White House to be lit orange for gun violence awareness

By Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN

The White House will be illuminated in orange Friday night in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, as the nation has been shaken by a recent string of deadly mass shootings.

The White House’s north facade will be bathed in orange light from Friday at sunset until 1:30 a.m. ET Saturday.

Several other government buildings — including California’s Capitol dome and City Hall in New York City — will also be lit up in orange over the weekend.

The eighth annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day comes as people in the US are reeling from a spate of mass shootings in the last month, including at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, a supermarket in the heart of a Black community in Buffalo, New York and a medical facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

President Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal for stricter gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background check laws and a higher minimum age of purchase.

The first annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day was in June 2015 on what would have been the 18th birthday of Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago teenager who was mistakenly shot and killed two years prior. Hadiya was killed a week after she performed at one of the events surrounding former President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.

Project Orange Tree, an organization started by Pendleton’s friends after a youth panel discussion about her death, began the movement to wear orange to raise awareness and honor her.

Orange was chosen to symbolize the value of human life and is worn as a signal that wearers do not want to be the next victim of gun violence, Nza-Ari Khepra, a co-founder of Project Orange Tree and Wear Orange Campaign, had told CNN in 2015. The idea comes from hunters who wear the color to alert fellow hunters to their presence.

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CNN’s Nikki Carvajal contributed to this report.