Chilling reason for teens' three-minute White House 'lie in'

A group of teenagers staged a “lie-in” outside the White House this week to show their support for the victims of last week’s mass shooting at a Florida high school — and to demand action from President Trump on gun control.

The students, with Teens for Gun Reform in Washington, DC, took turns lying down for three minutes at a time to symbolise “how quickly” the organisation says it could have taken suspected shooter Nikolas Cruz to legally purchase the gun he allegedly used to kill 17 people.

Cruz allegedly opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14.

“We have organised this protest in solidarity with all of those who were affected by the horrific school shooting in Florida,” the organisation, which was formed following last week’s massacre, said in a statement posted on its Facebook page.

“We call on President Trump and leaders from both parties to finally act in the interest of America’s youth and end these tragic mass shootings!”

Dozens of teenagers participated in Monday’s lie-in. More than 700 people RSVP’d for the event on Facebook.

The protest came as Cruz fronted a Florida courtroom wearing a red, jail-issued uniform.

He sat without showing any emotion, his head bowed, during the short hearing in Fort Lauderdale on Monday. The content of the motion filed by his lawyers was not described in the hearing.

President Trump, who is spending the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, was not at the White House at the time of the protest.

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The demonstration was just one of several student-led protests planned in response to the Florida school shooting.

A national school walkout organised by Stoneman Douglas students is planned for March 14. A separate walkout, organised by a Connecticut high school student, is scheduled for April 20 on what will be the 20th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School.

And a “March For Our Lives” event, also organised by a group of students at Stoneman Douglas, is slated for March 24 in the nation's capital. Each protest has a similar mission: to demand action on gun control.

“We are going to make ourselves so loud and so brazen so they won’t be able to ignore us in the White House,” Delaney Tarr, a Stoneman Douglas senior who is helping to organise the “March For Our Lives” event, said on CBS This Morning.

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At a weekend rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday, Tarr and other survivors of last week’s shooting gave impassioned speeches calling for congressional action on guns.

“They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence — we call BS!” Emma Gonzalez, another senior, said at the rally.

“They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun — we call BS! They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars — we call BS!

"They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred — we call BS! That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works — we call BS!”