Advertiser columnist Ruth Wishart asks whether the 'March For Our Lives' rallies in the US could mark a turning point in the country's gun control debate.

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There was one young girl in particular. A young black girl.

She was 11 years old, she announced, and she stood proudly behind the podium, her neck encased in a vivid orange scarf against the chill, her long curly hair blowing cheerfully in all directions.

She made a speech about gun control about which anyone three times her age could have been proud.

Then again, they all did, those students who organised a brilliant demonstration in Washington and across the United States last Saturday.

The teenage boys who told the Congressmen and women who were in thrall to the National Rifle Association that they were a couple of year off voting, and they were coming to get them.

Martin Luther King’s tiny granddaughter, saying she too had a dream, that guns and their carnage could be no more.

And, first among equals, the shaven headed Emma Gonzales in her teenage uniform of badge-bedecked combat jacket and torn jeans.

She pulled off a theatrical coup which would have challenged the nerve of any orator: she said her piece about the day a former pupil came into her Florida school and gunned down 17 people.

Then she stood in absolute silence for what seemed to the crowd an eternity, some of whom attempted premature applause, a few of whom cheered.

But, when her phone alarm went off beside her, everyone got it. She had stood in front of a massive crowd for exactly the number of minutes and seconds the shooter had gone about his horrific business.

That took guts. That took imagination. Move over dinosaurs, it said.

We’ve had it up to here with your craven refusals to alter a system which thinks a 200-plus year-old amendment giving the right to bear arms, somehow means households buying up the kind of assault weapons designed for battlefield warfare.

In terms of deaths by shooting, the American statistics are off the charts. In terms of gun ownership, they are off the charts.

Yet bone-headedly they refuse to make the obvious connection.

Guns don’t kill people, they intone. People kill people. Yes of course they do. But only in these tragic numbers when they have unlimited access to powerful firearms.

The March for Our Lives protest drew admiration and support from across the world – Scotland included.

In Edinburgh, survivors of the Dunblane atrocity, 22 years ago this month, were amongst those who posted a video showing how their tragedy prompted a change in the laws, which in turn ensured that Thomas Hamilton would hopefully be the last man able to enter a schoolroom and mow down children in the UK.

Tellingly, a group of American service veterans also made a short film on the subject, testifying to the power of the weapons which are now legally on sale to the general public in the States, and graphically illustrating what their impact would be.

Will this finally be the tipping point which turns the US from its love affair with personal weaponry?

Perhaps. As is the way of these things, the level of emotion and commitment demonstrated at last Saturday’s protests will abate in time.

But America’s mid-term elections loom later this year. And these kids have vowed that their next campaign will be on the subject of voter registration in the hope of kicking gun-loving, NRA-funded representatives out of Congress.

As they say these days, it’s a big ask. But don’t bet against them. They were simply magnificent.