Saturday’s “March for Our Lives” anti-gun protest in Washington, DC, attracted 200,000–less than half of what organizers planned.
The event’s organizers had obtained a permit for up to 500,000 people for the rally in Washington, on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.
Estimating the size of a crowd is difficult, but experts can analyze aerial images of large events to determine how many people showed up.
According to a Virginia-based company, Digital Design & Imaging Service, just 202,796 people–give or take 15%–attended the rally.
That’s fitting with the estimate from the Washington Metro, which reported that there were about 150,000 more round trips on the day of the march than on a typical Saturday.
But estimates of a poor showing at the rally hasn’t stopped organizers from claiming the crowd was, in fact, much bigger.
In a tweet on Saturday, March for Our Lives claimed that 850,000 attended the event–a figure that was reported as fact by a number of media publication, despite experts claiming otherwise.
If March for Our Lives really did attract 850,000 people, it would make it by far the largest single-day protest in U.S. history–more than doubling the 440,000 people who attended the 2017 Women’s March, held the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
