One day after the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech school shootings, an anti-gun rally staged in White Plaza dueled for attention with idyllic weather, rap music and a host of event promotions.

“It’s time to make sure that our voices are not silenced by the blast of a gun barrel,” said Theo Milonopoulos ‘09, also an editor at The Daily, in a speech during Thursday’s rally.

Milonopoulos and his twin brother Niko ‘09, who jointly organized the event, decried what they saw as a lack of meaningful federal firearms regulation and called for observers to “pressure your elected officials to have the courage to keep us safe.”

On Apr. 16, 2007, 23-year-old undergraduate Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 other students and himself at Virginia Tech in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. On Feb. 14 of this year, a former graduate student at Northern Illinois University killed five students and himself in another school shooting.

Stanford is currently in the process of initiating an emergency mass notification system to be used in campus-wide emergencies, such as a shooting. The system will alert students and University staff to potential dangers via simultaneous emails, text and phone messages. Since yesterday, Axess users have been required to update or verify their phone numbers and provide an emergency contact in order to log in.

In the Virginia Tech shootings of one year ago, roughly two hours elapsed between Cho’s initial murder of two students in a dormitory and his subsequent violent rampage in a separate academic building. Though police, emergency medical services and the administration had been notified of the incident, students and staff were not alerted prior to the second set of killings.

At yesterday’s rally, about 20 students wearing commemorative orange and red ribbons around their necks gathered in front of the Birdcage in White Plaza during the lunch hour. Many were dressed in black. A brief speech by Theo Milonopoulos riddled with statistics on gun violence among youth opened the rally.

The gun-control advocates were not the only ones occupying White Plaza. At a booth next to the Birdcage, girls dressed in white tennis skirts and large-framed, black designer sunglasses raised funds for this year’s Senior Gift, turning their backs and chatting as the rally carried on. Rap music blasted from a booth selling tickets to an upcoming show for DV8, a student hip-hop dance group.

The Stanford Savoyards, a student drama troupe, sold tickets to their production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Yeoman of the Guard” at an adjacent table. A promoter repeatedly shouted, “Execution tomorrow night!” until just before the rally’s 12:45 p.m. start.

The rally proceeded under a large banner advertising los Hermanos de Stanford’s “Club Caliente” party.

After his speech, Milonopoulos read the names of the 32 victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. Rally participants symbolically lay on the ground in front of the Birdcage during the name readings.

Niko Milonopoulos concluded the event by recounting the story of Jamiel Shaw, a 17 year-old Stanford football recruit killed last month in a gang-related shooting in Los Angeles.

The brothers organized the rally with support from the Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project (STAMP), a campus group promoting social change through dramatic performance.

In 1998, Theo and Niko Milonopoulos, then 11 years-old, founded an anti-gun-violence youth advocacy group, Kidz Voice-LA, in response to rising levels of gun-violence in their North Hollywood community. In 2006, the two founded Vox Populi, an advocacy group with similar aims.

Asked about the University’s newly initiated emergency notification system, Milonopoulos suggested, “It can help prevent deaths from occurring when the situation is at its most immediate,” but stressed the necessity of legislative reform in reducing gun-violence.