Thirteen-year-old Jasper McGill, who helped organize the Orono march, said that a goal of March for Our Lives movement is to put lawmakers on notice that students are serious about gun control.

“We may not be able to vote now, but we will be able to vote in the future and we won’t forget if they fail to protect us now,” he said. “The gun lobby may be strong, but kids are stronger. We are stubborn and we are determined. We will never give up until every kid feels safe in school every day.”

A speaker in Portland agreed.

“The question can no longer be, ‘Should we do something?’” said Kasper Wilder, a junior at Portland High School. “It must be, ‘What can we do?’”

Several hundred people marched in Bangor from the Abbot Square parking lot to the Hammond Street Congregational Church.

Lauren Turcotte Seavey, a junior at Bangor High School, told three generations of people crowded into the sanctuary of the United Church of Christ building that she hoped to use her voice “for the better” after hearing news reports about gun violence in schools for much of her life.

“The students and adults who have lost their lives to gun violence should be more than a statistic,” she said. “They’re the kids who took dance classes, played the cello, was a star basketball player or the teacher who has family at home but still risked their life so that their students could go home to their families.”

Turcotte Seavey called for schools to have active shooter drills rather than just the lock down drills she has experienced in Bangor.

“Schools and people need to lose the mentality that ‘this is never going to happen to us, no one would want to do that to our school’ and step up to make sure that if something were to happen, everyone would be safe,” she said.

After the sun set Saturday and all the marches were over, two alternating projections appeared on the state office building attached to the Capitol in Augusta. One said, “Property of the NRA.” The said, “Sold to the NRA.”

The projections were the work of LumenARRT! a project of the Artists Rapid Response Team. Members work through the Union of Maine Visual Artists to advocate for artists and further the work of progressive nonprofits in Maine.

“Our video projections create a visual voice for these organizations and like electronic graffiti, bring awareness to issues of social, political and environmental justice,” the group’s website said.

Anita Clearfield, a member of the group, said the group created the projections to support students’ efforts in the March for Our Lives movement to tighten gun control laws. She said that bills to raise the age a teen can buy a gun in Maine and ban assault-style weapons have failed due to lobbying by the National Rifle Association and its members in Maine.