Jackie had gone to Tallahassee with an emotional appeal. “It didn’t really work,” she said a few weeks later. “Rick Scott did defy the NRA, so obviously it meant something, but it’s just like a Band-Aid on a wound,” she said. “It’s not going to do anything.”
They had to counter with credible demands. For two weeks, they had been demanding gun reform, but what exactly? Some of them were short on specifics; others, like David, were deep in the weeds. They all had different ideas. No consistency—big problem. It was vital that they speak in one voice—or they risked not being heard.
A subtler issue was also surfacing—tone. They were taking some withering abuse, and they knew better than to turn vicious in response, but where were the lines? Twenty-plus personalities were their strength, but they needed boundaries on aggression. It was awkward to start imposing rules on each other. The incoming attacks were all over the map.
The Peace Warriors arrived at just the right moment. They helped shape the MFOL policy agenda and the tenor of their approach. They all kept talking: by email, phone, and text. The Parkland kids peppered the Peace Warriors with questions about the six principles, and then burrowed deeper on their own. The more they learned, the more they found it was like listening to themselves—a better, wiser version of the selves they were fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures.
They were most influenced by principle number 3: “Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.” Gun violence is the enemy, legislators blocking solutions were a problem, and those legislators were adversaries, not enemies—and that was a clear distinction, not just a grammatical point. Even if they had been corrupted by NRA money, none of those people were evil, and none of them deserved to be treated as if they were.
The Parkland kids loved the spirit of the principles and their practical implications even more. Politics in America had grown deeply polarized and personal, and that was benefitting no one. It sure as hell hadn’t led to sensible gun laws. Demonizing your adversaries just sealed off ears. Right about that time, David Hogg identified the hardest part of their fight: “People mishearing what we’re trying to say. Like, do we want an assault weapons ban? Yeah, we do, but, we don’t want to take the Second Amendment away. We want responsible owners to be able to own guns. A lot of people have said that we’re like Nazis trying to take their guns and stuff—we fucking aren’t. We’re kids that are trying to save lives, and put reasonable gun legislation in place, where if you’re a mentally unstable individual or somebody with a criminal history, you can’t get a gun. And if you’re a criminal, we’re gonna come after your guns. I think we all can agree on that. But it’s these fringe arguments that so many of these people push that become the issue.”
David Hogg struggled with principle number 3 more than anyone on the team. He was a born debater, with a short fuse. He slipped past the boundaries frequently, but it helped to have a team drawing him back.
Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all. America was listening, eager to do something, supposedly, and turning to these teenagers to be led.
About a week after the powwow at Emma’s, Father Pfleger flew the Parkland kids up north for more meetings, adding a group of young Latino activists from the gritty Brighton Park neighborhood, and white kids from the North Side. “We kind of put together this black, white, brown, West Side, South Side, North Side group,” Father Pfleger said. “They’re very different, you know. The Parkland kids are afraid in school; our kids are afraid to go to and from school.” They all spent the day together, and walked the neighborhood, to get a sense of where they lived and how they lived. That sparked much deeper conversations than they’d had at Emma’s house—about how they felt about those conditions, and what they had done to try and change them. The Parkland kids loved that: fresh perspectives and fresh inspiration. They were a few weeks into this struggle—the Chicago kids had been born into it.
Chicago is battling a gun violence epidemic, but it’s generally seen by outsiders—even in affluent areas of Chicagoland—as a South Side problem. The Peace Warriors lived on the West Side. So did the Latino kids from Brighton Park. Each neighborhood was unique, with varying cultures and systemic hurdles. Individualized projects work best, but organizers are much more effective working together. The Parkland powwows actually helped solidify local ties. “We’ve had several meetings trying to build this coalition here in Chicago,” Father Pfleger would say a few months later. But the real goal was a unified coalition across the country, especially one uniting cities and suburbs. “So it’s not just Chicago doing their thing, Parkland doing their thing,” Father Pfleger said. “How do we begin to connect these dots and unite the youth around America?”
The biggest hurdle was getting white America to reengage with the inner cities and try to help them out. It wasn’t a lack of caring; more a lack of hope. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and most of my family is there. I return regularly, and I rarely encounter people who are OK with the devastation going on nearby. Just as rare, though, are people doing anything significant to help. The problem seems too overwhelming and too intractable. We don’t really understand what’s going on there, or see any way out. So mostly, we turn away.
The Parkland kids copped to the same ignorance before they were attacked. They had no clue what the kids in Chicago, Baltimore, or Compton were going through, or how to help them. But they were astonished how easy it was to learn. Two days together, a trip to one of their neighborhoods, and a lot of follow-up texts, and they had a pretty solid foundation. It wasn’t that hard.
They also found it refreshing to see what an impact the Peace Warriors and the BRAVE kids were having on their neighborhoods and their schools. Some projects were failing miserably, others having tremendous success. But even the successful ones had one tragic element in common: virtually no financial support. America saw all these places as gaping holes of hopelessness and despair. Even locally, few suburbanites had ever heard of the Peace Warriors or any of the successful groups. Fund-raising was nearly impossible, because media coverage was nonexistent. So promising projects remained small and lacked basic resources—which hampered their ability to prove themselves sufficiently to draw more funding or exposure. A vicious cycle.
Could the MFOL kids change that? They had a megaphone. They were eager to share it, but what if they could do better? Could they merge their movement with this huge existing urban network? It might be invisible to white America, but these folks had infrastructure, proven methods, voters, and a just cause.
Despite all the work they did with groups like BRAVE and the Peace Warriors, MFOL still took a lot of flack in some circles for being a bunch of white kids. This criticism was most painful when it came from other Douglas students. At first, it had felt like the group had the diversity issue covered. MFOL was male, female, straight, gay, and bi, and had lots of Latinos. They were not trying to exclude anybody, they were just working with the kids they knew. There were plenty of other Douglas groups representing other demographics. Did they have to check all the boxes? Yes, came the reply from some quarters. Lots of other groups were active, but MFOL was sucking up 99 percent of the attention. And the bulk of donations. If they were going to speak for not just this school, but this generation—especially if they were going to represent the urban black struggle—they had to be more inclusive within their ranks.
Time for demands. Solutions had to be specific, and far reaching, but reasonable. Above all, they pledged to keep their hands off the Second Amendment. They didn’t want to cause trouble for hunters, gun collectors, or gun enthusiasts—although they didn’t think hunters had the right to a howitzer or an M16.
Matt Deitsch, one of the recent grads, led the research project. The kids had returned to school, but he was going to withdraw from his college semester. He plowed through reams of studies and articles to create a syllabus, and then circulated the best material among the group. They read, discussed, argued, went back to do more research, and finally settled.
They quickly developed five demands—and they called them that—(1) universal, comprehensive background checks; (2) a digitized, searchable database for the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives); (3) funding for the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence; (4) a ban on high-capacity magazines; (5) a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles. Not one of them was specific to mass shooters or schools.
Professor Robert Spitzer weighed in on their agenda. Spitzer is an expert on gun politics. He is chairman of the political science department at the State University of New York College at Cortland and has written five books on gun policy and gun politics, and written about it for the New York Times. “I think it’s policy smart and it indicates a very shrewd eye to how they would like to proceed,” he said. That didn’t mean candidates could drop them right into their stump speeches. The movement actually requires two agendas, Spitzer said: one for policy and a variation to run on.
“If I were running for office on the gun issue, I probably wouldn’t organize it around these particular items,” he said. Demands two and three were too boring and inside-baseball for voters presented as policy. But they could be powerful for a candidate and a movement that summarized them conceptually as plugging all the holes in a pathetically leaky system. And they could get much more mileage by driving home the message of why the background check system is so ineffective: it was deliberately undermined by the NRA. “I’m sure very few people are aware of the fact that the ATF still does its background checks from paper records located in a building in West Virginia,” Professor Spitzer said. “They were barred from computerizing their records back in the 1980s by pressure from the NRA written into legislation. When I repeat that now, reporters are kind of shocked, asking, ‘Is that really true? How could that be true? No computers?’”
Voters don’t understand this, Spitzer said. They will be outraged once someone demonstrates that effectively.
The same concept applies to demand three, Spitzer said, though its potential is somewhat less explosive. It’s hard to find people against studying an issue. Of course most voters would support study, and be disgusted to learn that was forbidden—though it won’t bring them out to the polls. It’s vital that it be written into legislation, though, so that as the movement succeeds in passing legislation, the system can be studied as it evolves. Various changes will prove more and less effective than anticipated. The ability to study what we’re doing will be critical for long-term success. That’s pretty obvious—unless your goal is undermining that success.
The sticky item on that list was banning semiautomatic rifles, Spitzer said. “It’s a pretty hot gun issue to touch. There is support for it, candidates have campaigned on it, including some former military candidates. But . . .” That one really depended on the district, he said. You could run on it in urban areas, but it would be tricky in a lot of swing districts. Candidates really have to read their district on that one. There was movement on semiautomatics, though, Spitzer said, even before Parkland. “Right now there actually is majority support for restricting or banning assault weapons and that was not the case ten years ago. That’s kind of a marker of the outer edge of policy ideas that can win majority support.”
Background checks were the no-brainer, Spitzer said. “It’s low-hanging fruit. Ninety percent of Americans consistently support uniform background checks, as do eighty percent of gun owners. So it’s practically universal support. It’s hard to get ninety percent support for anything in America.”
Spitzer had a few suggestions for candidates beyond the MFOL demands. “I would talk about a terrorist watch list. I would talk about doing a better job of getting information about people who have mental illnesses, because that’s been a big problem. And that’s also something that everybody agrees on, and it’s something you can explain. And that would be plenty. I think those three things alone would be plenty in a campaign.”
MFOL had an agenda now, and was sizing up its adversary. The NRA closely guards its membership data, but it claims nearly five million members—“And David Hogg is three of them,” Jackie took to telling audiences later. “Lots of people like to buy us memberships.” They doubted the five million figure, but if accurate, it represents just 1.5 percent of the population. Yet the NRA has succeeded by turning out reliable single-issue voters to swing close elections, with no countervailing force. Sizable majorities favor gun reform, but progressives never vote on guns. That asymmetry allows a tiny minority to consistently defeat huge majorities, or to convince politicians they will. The NRA’s aura of invincibility goes largely untested, because officials so rarely risk opposing it, even on trivial matters. Every “wrong” vote, even for legislation backed by solid majorities of gun owners, chips away at a legislator’s NRA score, which can energize a primary opponent.
MFOL had to be that countervailing force. They had to demonstrate they could match the NRA vote for vote. Optimally, exceed it. They set their sights on November, to prove to an audience of 435 that it’s riskier to oppose them than the NRA. They saw the number one battleground as the House of Representatives. They had to overturn some seats.
Most of the MFOL kids were too young to vote. They couldn’t even check into a hotel room, and a parent or two had to chaperone them on every trip. There were a lot of trips. Jackie Corin estimated she had logged thirty thousand miles or more that spring, meeting with school groups, legislators, academics, and activists, traveling as far as a conference in Kenya. She wasn’t even the most frequent flier—that would be David, though a dozen of them were practically living on the road. They were soaking up so much out there: organizing techniques, messaging, what was working, what was falling flat, what kids out in the trenches really needed, and how their tweets were rippling out into local communities in unforeseen ways, good and bad. Time to change the fear dynamic. All that local contact crystallized their phase two strategy long before the march: Leverage all that enthusiasm. Organize it.
Young voters have long been a sleeping giant of American politics, because most of them stay home. If they ever turned out in percentages to match their older counterparts, they could swing most elections. Trouble is, they never do. Millions of students were answering the call but were unsure what to do. Most of them were new to all this. The message from MFOL was simple: Get started. Start small. Grab a clipboard, grab a friend, start a sibling march in your community. A prominent link on the group’s website spelled it all out. They were stunned by how many visited the site.
Every event, big or small, modest or glamorous, came with one demand: voter registration—a table or booth or preferably a clipboard team hitting up the venue and the parking lot. David Hogg was frequently seen working the crowd. They had to walk the walk, demonstrating the imperative “You can’t vote, if you don’t register.”
All those local kids would have to shoulder the long, hard grunt work of sending teams through their neighborhoods to register voters, and staffing booths at their schools. They would have to continue connecting and recruiting and expanding their networks, every day until Election Day, to keep excitement high and turn out the vote. MFOL provided guidance, structure, publicity, and talking points. Local organizers from half a dozen states whose groups had been jump-started by MFOL were radiant. Often the biggest things the Parkland kids brought was validation: most kids didn’t believe they were qualified to do these things until the Florida activists paved the way. Early on, the Parkland kids noticed something significant: every high school visit required a student to invite them, to win faculty approval, and recruit classmates to execute the event. The simple act of visiting these schools was activating young leaders and giving them a first taste of organizing. MFOL couldn’t hit 435 US House districts. They could not hit hundreds of thousands more state and local electoral regions. The kids they connected with could. The MFOL kids brought attention, excitement, talking points, and a template. A network was taking shape in their wake.
The NRA had lain low after the shooting. That was its MO. A New York Times story called it “a well-rehearsed response”: keep as quiet as possible until the gun control conversation cools down. But it always cooled down quickly. What if Parkland was different?
NRA leadership stuck to the plan. No public statements, and they pulled way back on Twitter. In the two weeks before the attack, @NRA posted about twenty original tweets a week. For the five days immediately after, that dropped to zero. But then it roared back: more than thirty each of the next two weeks. This signal to resume attack came eight days after the shooting. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, broke his silence at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where his name was initially kept off the program to mute protest. He carefully avoided attacking MFOL directly, but hammered “elites” and “socialists” who “don’t care not one whit” about saving kids. “They care more about control, and more of it,” he said. “Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms. . . . They hate the NRA, they hate the Second Amendment, they hate individual freedom.”
The Twitter account followed the same rules, for months afterward, generally training its fire on media stories about gun safety. There was not one tweet attacking David Hogg by name until August 4, and still nothing tagging Emma as of early fall. But to the NRA’s own tight audience, it was a very different story. The Times described a furious debate that first week on NRATV, the organization’s online video channel. Hosts of its shows “spoke chillingly of leftist plots to confiscate weapons, media conspiracies to brainwash Americans,” the Times reported. “With broadcast television–quality production and three dozen original series, NRATV has the ability to reach millions of people through the channels that distribute it like Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.” NRATV had deep resources, as part of the NRA’s $35 million membership support program.
For its first big salvo, the NRA struck strategically: March 4, Oscar night. While the ceremony was underway, NRATV released a slick sixty-second video of spokeswoman Dana Loesch eviscerating “every Hollywood phony” and everything Hollywood stood for. She sat beside an hourglass in a black dress against a black background to deliver a scathing tirade against politicians, late-night hosts, athletes, and “every lying member of the media”—all the supposed puppet masters pulling the MFOL strings. It ended with Loesch appropriating the Me Too movement’s #TimesUp by saying, “Your time is running out; the clock starts now,” and flipping over the hourglass. NRATV tweeted the clip with the #TimesUp and #Oscars hashtags. It scored 4.4 million views that week.
Sarah Chadwick posted a parody response video the next day, one of MFOL’s first videos. It clocked 1.2 million views in the same week. They had some catching up to do, but the kids didn’t have $35 million or three dozen TV series with established audiences. Not bad for the first time out.
Meanwhile, they were expanding their website, with a new logo, new swag for sale, and a toolkit for kids around the country to use to start their own local marches. The sibling marches were gaining way more traction than they had ever dreamed.
They were constantly trying out fresh tactics, but an underlying strategy was maintaining the megaphone. Weeks after the tragedy, David Hogg explained why he thought they had finally broken through. “The immediate choke hold that we placed on the news cycle, to make sure that people would not be able to look away from this,” he said. Five weeks to the march was always a risk, but they couldn’t take on another megaproject till they pulled off that one. They could use a little juice, though, and lots of other groups were sprouting up as well. Families of the fallen created Change the Ref, Meadow’s Movement, and Orange Ribbons for Jaime. Fellow students started Shine MSD, Parents Promise to Kids, Societal Reform Corporation, and others. Shine MSD was the most prominent, growing out of the anthemic song about the tragedy written by students Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña. They recorded the song and released it on iTunes, and it became a hit. And a huge momentum boost would come from the two National School Walkouts. They dovetailed perfectly with MFOL and they coordinated closely—to the point that much of the public assumed it was all a single effort—but mercifully, each walkout was organized and implemented by its own local team.
Before Valentine’s Day had ended, Lane Murdock had decided to convert her horror into action. She would stage a walkout. Murdock was a high school sophomore in Ridgefield, Connecticut, just twenty miles from Sandy Hook. She posted her idea as a Change.org petition before she went to bed that night. She had a powerful date in mind for her walkout: April 20, the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine that set this horrible wave in motion.
When MFOL announced its march on Washington that weekend, Murdock adapted her walkout into an all-day affair. The nonprofit group Indivisible helped Murdock’s petition take off. Soon it became a national movement.
But Murdock’s idea took a little while to gain national attention, and by then a different walkout had built a huge head of steam. The youth branch of the Women’s March, EMPOWER, announced their own plan two days after Valentine’s Day. It set its sights on March 14, the one-month anniversary of Parkland.
So there were the National School Walkouts in the works, organized independently, and benefiting from shared publicity.
But was it all accomplishing anything? How much were they affecting the gun debate? The Trace studied media coverage after the last seven major mass shootings. They all drove gun control into the conversation briefly, but peaked in the first two days, constituting around 2 percent of all news stories. Coverage then dropped off drastically, even after Orlando and Las Vegas. Parkland’s coverage actually rose after two days, peaking at 4 percent. It held near 2 percent for a solid month. Then one month out, something unprecedented in media would happen. The first National School Walkout would draw so much coverage, it would hit 5 percent of all news stories, eclipsing even the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Elise Jordan is a Republican political analyst and a Time magazine columnist. She has been participating in an ongoing series of focus groups around the country for the Ashcroft in America Research Project since 2016. She was astonished by the responses from conservative Republican focus groups in Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, in March.
“They wanted commonsense gun reform, and everyone at the table owned a gun,” Jordan said. These people had fought gun control their entire lives. They were not ready to embrace the entire gun safety agenda, but were ready for something new.
“Can we knock it after we’ve tried it?” one voter asked. Another one said, “I think enough people see these stories and think, ‘I might not agree with it, but if you think you’re doing something to prevent that from happening, give it your best shot, because I’m tired of watching those stories.’”
Jordan had spent much of her life with these people. She grew up in a small town in Mississippi, surrounded by guns in her home. She called herself a Second Amendment absolutist until Parkland. Then she had had enough. She was taken aback to see how many of her fellow Mississippians had, too. “I think the NRA is out of step with gun owners,” Jordan said. “Gun owners are all for commonsense reform; they don’t want to see their children mowed down in schools.”