March For Our Lives, March 24 2018

CNN)Thousands of students, teachers and other concerned citizens descended on the capital Saturday carrying signs and wearing symbolic price tags to say "enough" to gun violence.

Many of the speakers at the March for Our Lives rally were students propelled into the debate over gun laws when a 19-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle mowed down their classmates and teachers last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The student activists in Washington were buoyed by a massive crowd, and knowing there were more than 800 planned sister marches in the United States and in major cities around the world. The Parkland kids implored people to register to vote. They pleaded with the adults -- the lawmakers -- to take care of children.

"We will not stop," one student said as rally leaders thanked the crowd after the event filled with speeches and performance by celebrity singers. "We are magic. We are power."

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP event was set for 6 hours beginning at noon, Eastern Time, on 24 March 2018. This period covered the time of demonstrations across the whole US. There were also sympathetic demonstrations around the world, many of which were timed to coincided with the marches in the US.

Interpretation

The following graph is a visual display of the statistical result. It shows the second-by-second accumulation of small deviations of the data from what’s expected. Our prediction is that deviations will tend to be positive, and if this is so, the jagged line will tend to go upward. If the endpoint is positive, this is evidence for the general hypothesis and adds to the bottom line. If the endpoint is outside the smooth curve showing 0.05 probability, the deviation is nominally significant. If the trend of the cumulative deviation is downward, this is evidence against the hypothesis, and is subtracted from the bottom line. For more detail on how to interpret the results, see The Science and related pages, as well as the standard caveat below.

Standard caveat

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every success might be largely driven by chance, and every null might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.