Florida’s teenage anti-gun activists who saw their classmates murdered in the latest school shooting have shifted the Second Amendment debate in the US more in a few days than conventional political pressure has managed in recent years. How far can their movement go?

 

“Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call;

Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall…”

  • Bob Dylan, 1964.

 

“And these children, that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds;

They’re immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware what they’re going through…”

  • David Bowie, 1971.

 

Teachers and staff returned to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Monday. Students are expected to go back to lessons on Wednesday. Except that 17 of their classmates will not be with them.

As the fallout from the Valentines Day mass shooting intensified this past week, a pair of remarkable events unfolded on television. While they were both prompted by this specific tragedy and motivated by the understanding that it is unlikely to be the last of its kind; the contrast between them heightened many expectations that the nation may be edging closer to a meaningful political turning point on gun control that has appeared elusive even after previous shooting atrocities.

CNN hosted a powerful Town Hall, at which Parkland survivors and their families directly addressed some of Florida’s elected representatives, as well as a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, the biggest pro-gun organization in the country.

Watch the full CNN broadcast here.

Sen Marco Rubio, who found himself getting credit among some commentators just for showing up – although as Stephen Colbert later pointed out, the people in the audience are his employers – may not have done himself any favours, as the crowd jeered his non-committal answers on both the effectiveness of an assault weapons ban and taking campaign contributions from the NRA.

The broadcast acted as a high-profile national rallying point for the “Never Again” movement that had grown up organically in the wake of the shooting, while a subsequent poll for CNN showed that “support for stricter gun laws has spiked to the highest level since 1993, and almost two-thirds say government and society can take action to prevent future mass shootings.”

Significantly, though, Rubio did appear to offer some concessions around the legal age to purchase weapons and appeared to reject the widely-criticized suggestion put forward by President Trump of arming teachers and increasing armed security within schools.

Neither Trump nor Florida Gov Rick Scott were part of the CNN event; Trump instead choosing to host his own “listening session” where he, Vice-President Mike Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met with students and families from Parkland and previous school shootings.

Watch the full White House broadcast here.

It was certainly just as emotional television as CNN’s show, But in an ironically revealing moment which, when history is written, will literally be one of those that characterize his presidency – he was shown to be holding a list of talking points written on White House stationery, the last of which was, simply, and pointlessly, “I Hear You”.

Not surprisingly, the #IHearYou hashtag quickly spread.

Trump’s initial attempt to tie the shooting to the FBI investigation into Russian election meddling had drawn angry reactions from students who survived the shooting and their friends, who have seized their window of media exposure to take on politicians and the powerful gun lobby in a movement that has been snowballing in recent days.

As well as multiple media appearances by several of the students, there were dramatic protests outside the White House and at the Florida Statehouse in Tallahassee, where kids watched as lawmakers decided that pornography was apparently a bigger threat to public health than assault weapons.

The President’s responses at his listening session, as well as advocating arming teachers, included a greater emphasis on mental health and improved background checks for buyers. “It’s not going to be talk like it’s been in the past,” he said.

But almost as soon as the two TV events were over, though, there were signs of pushback from the NRA. The head of the organization, Wayne LaPierre, appeared at the CPAC gathering to double down on resisting enforced change, and to attack gun control advocates as people who “hate individual freedom.” The Guardian reports:

LaPierre sought to put the warnings in the wider context of a “socialist enemy” within, who he said “oppose our fundamental freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights”. He claimed that the Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx were ascendent on university campuses, describing socialism as “a political disease”.

The NRA chief warned the packed ballroom: “You should be anxious and you should be frightened. If these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate and, God forbid, they win the White House again our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever, and the first to go will be the second amendment to the US constitution” – the right to bear arms.

But in perhaps an indication of the significance of the reach of the Parkland survivors’ campaign and how worried gun supporters might be by it, the NRA started to see some of its commercial partners back off, from airlines to car rental companies to insurers. The NRA’s response was to rip the withdrawing corporate sponsors for what it called a “shameful display of cowardice.”

 

Calling BS

Despite the NRA’s warnings that citizens “should be frightened” though, it’s worth bearing in mind that statistics show Americans don’t, in fact, love guns.

A 2016 study of gun ownership showed that “Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult…But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.”

So is it possible that hardened second amendment advocates may be realizing that they could be on the wrong side of history, and that this might actually represent a “sea change moment” that frustratingly eluded the nation in the aftermath of Sandy Hook?

It’s probably too early to say, but one significant thing is that the students of Parkland and elsewhere who will march and protest and tweet and speak out, will be of voting age very soon – many in time for November’s midterms. One of their more prominent figures, Emma Gonzalez, now has more Twitter followers than either the NRA or its high-profile spokesperson she famously confronted on CNN’s Town Hall, Dana Loesch.

Despite the perhaps inevitable character attacks from the right-wing media the Florida teens continue to speak out, but their message is spreading; from people like elected representatives such as Republican congressman Brian Mast to ordinary individuals like one Ohio woman who sent her local Congressman a fundraising check made out not for a dollar amount but for “Thoughts and Prayers”.

Charlie Pierce wrote in Esquire that, while the “country is broken, the kids are alright.”

I was initially skeptical about whether or not Parkland was going to matter any more in the long run than Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Las Vegas mattered. A lot of that has melted away. This may be a sea change in the issue. There’s a natural savvy at work here from kids who have spent the last few years creating communities on their laptops and phones. Now, instead of communities dedicated to TV shows, music, sports, fashion, and who’s zoomin’ who in fourth-period Bio, the communities being created are being created to design ongoing political action on an issue that literally was life and death a week ago. 

This is how the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement, got themselves going in the media Stone Age. It can happen faster now, and it can spread around the world, and these kids know that better than anyone else does.

As the president has sought to deflect responsibility, and the NRA has circled its economic wagons against an ideological assault from Generation Z, the Parkland teens are seizing their window of opportunity to act on behalf of more than just themselves. It has been an example of youth empowerment worthy of – and not inconsiderably encouraged by – media representations of powerful and confident young people, torn from the scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Hunger Games, or Maze Runner.

But just as important as the next steps for the teenage activists is how the establishment reacts to them. Even as some Texas schools have said they would suspend any student who protested against gun laws a number of leading universities across the country – including Yale, MIT, Johns Hopkins, UCLA and George Washington – have come out to assure students that their chances of admission won’t be damaged by taking part in peaceful protest. “Hopkins values students who engage in peaceful and productive civic engagement,” the Baltimore university said. “Our undergrad admissions office supports students who take respectful action, and your admission will not be negatively impacted if you are disciplined for expressing yourself in a peaceful way.”

 

Not politics-as-usual

What this past week showed is that, for the next generation of American voters, a generation made politically aware by Jon Stewart and others, hypocrisy is the new red line.

In the land of politics-as-usual, it often seemed like politicians had forgotten that videotape even existed, or that their statements today can be easily and damagingly compared to those they’ve made in the past. Holding that sort of mirror up to the behavior of elected representatives will inevitably display the shallowness of those who put themselves or their party ahead of the country. And for voters of the future, that could well mean the difference between the traditional resigned indifference and a new, proactive approach to the consent of the governed.

As for President Trump, it may have seemed like the “I Hear You” memo was a visual faux pas too far. That was until Monday, when his re-election campaign sent out a fundraising request featuring a picture of him in hospital with a young woman injured in the shooting. The reaction, as you’d expect, was brutal.

Writing in The Guardian on Saturday, Gary Younge, author of an excellent, and harrowing, book on child shootings – Another Day in the Death of America – argued that young people can’t change US gun laws alone, “but they could tip the balance.” He writes:

History has shown that young people and students have the ability to expose a crisis and challenge it, but rarely defeat or solve it unilaterally. They are more likely to be the spark for the broader struggles than the flame itself. The systemic threat youth and students pose is one of contagion – that their energy and commitment will infect others with more leverage, who may join them.

Whatever changes might happen next, they were never going to happen overnight. And certainly, the immediate direction the debate takes depends heavily on what wider-world events might occur between now and the March for Our Lives in the nation’s capital and around the country on March 24. But the past few days may well have helped move such changes closer; and even if the campaign proves frustrating in the short term, it may have galvanized a generation to action and possibly disrupted the conventional political landscape for elections to come.

 

Also published on Medium.