Prior to the March For Our Lives, Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James offered the following statement:

"As a mother and a grandmother, the problem of violence against children in our schools and in our streets shakes me to my core. Horrific events like the massacre at Parkland are opportunities for national soul searching, for coming together to find out what went wrong, and to do what it takes as a nation to prevent these attacks. That’s exactly why The Heritage Foundation has made it a priority to lead a serious and sustained conversation about school safety.

 

I applaud the many students who are joining in the quest for safer schools. Like all Americans, they strongly believe all schools must be secure. In order for real, lasting, and positive change to happen, we need every American to not only be involved but fully informed, too. That’s why The Heritage Foundation has launched our School Safety website at www.heritage.org/school-safety and is advancing solutions to ensure all students and schools are safe."

Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood also vocalized her support for protesters to hear the Conservative voice in the debate for school safety:

"Everyone agrees that children deserve to be safe at school. But too little has been done in the nearly 20 years between Columbine and Parkland to make our schools safer. We can’t allow another massacre in our schools or in the streets without offering real solutions that both protect our children and preserve our freedoms.

 

It’s time to set aside slogans and get serious about school safety. The issue of violence is complex. In order to solve the problem we have to address root causes like mental health, family breakdown, failures in law enforcement and discipline policy, and more.

 

A march organized primarily by the usual suspects on the extreme Left isn’t what we need if we truly want to solve the problem of violence in schools and communities across America. The organizers of the March for Our Lives have not a made single real and reasonable proposal about how we fix the problem. On the other hand, The Heritage Foundation has launched a school safety initiative that takes a holistic approach to the crisis that addresses the complex causes of violence and offers serious policy proposals and programs that strengthen families and communities and make schools safer."