Author: Ben Whitford / Source: Positive News
The teen survivors of the Parkland shooting have injected American gun politics with fresh energy. Ben Whitford explores how they have channelled their pain and grief into the fight for change
More than 200,000 people packed the streets of Washington DC in March 2018 and watched 18-year-old Emma González stand in silence, tears streaming down her face, for almost six and a half minutes.
It was the same length of time it had taken a gunman, five weeks earlier, to rampage through her school in Parkland, Florida, and murder 14 of her classmates as well as three members of staff.The shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School followed a script that has become horrifyingly familiar in the US: another troubled young man, another military-style weapon, another brace of lives ended or transfigured by senseless violence. But unlike past massacres – in Las Vegas, in Aurora, in Orlando, in Sandy Hook – the Parkland attack hasn’t simply faded from the national consciousness, to be replaced by some new scandal or calamity.
Instead, the teenagers who survived the shooting have used their grief and outrage to galvanise a new social movement. In towns and cities across the US, more than a million people took part in the Parkland students’ March for Our Lives rallies calling for action to end gun violence, with countless more joining school walkouts and other protests.
The news might all seem bad, but good things are happening too.
“We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks,” said González on the stage in Washington DC. “Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because we are going to be the last mass shooting.”
“It was as if lightning struck at Parkland,” says Diego Pfeiffer, an 18-year-old Parkland senior, who spent three hours hiding in a cupboard during the shooting, and who is now secretary of the students’ March for Our Lives organisation. “It brought death and sadness and grief and loss, but at the same time we picked ourselves up, we gained momentum, and we made something out of it – and now, hopefully, we’re going to change the world.”
Pfeiffer, González and other Parkland students have also given countless media interviews, built huge social media followings, lobbied lawmakers in Florida’s capital Tallahassee and in Washington, and have held their own in televised confrontations with President Trump, Florida senator Marco Rubio and other national leaders.
Their efforts are yielding results. Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature raised the minimum age for gun purchases from 18 to 21 and introduced a waiting period for buying rifles and other long guns. Across the US, 18 gun laws have been in enacted since the Parkland shooting, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence – a remarkable number in a nation that for decades has seemed paralysed in the face of gun violence.
Still, more action is needed, Pfeiffer says, including universal background checks for gun owners, federal funding for research into gun crime, and a complete ban on assault weapons like the one used at Parkland. “They gave us scraps, so we’ve got to push for more,” he says. “It’s always going to be a journey, but this is the first step.”
A paralysed nation
The US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world – 88 weapons per 100 people and more than 14 times the rate in England and Wales. On an average day, 96 people are shot dead in the US (including 34 murders and 59 suicides) and another 222 are shot and survive, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
But despite tragedies such as the 2017 Las Vegas attack, which left 59 dead and 851 injured, or the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in which 20 elementary school children died, there has been little action. In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, lawmakers failed even to pass legislation banning bump stocks, the device used by the shooter to convert his rifles into deadly, continuously-firing machine guns.
That’s partly due to constitutional protections: the second amendment grants citizens the right to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia,” but has been interpreted as guaranteeing individual citizens the right to carry military-style weapons.
It’s also due to the efforts of well-funded pro-gun groups, most notably the National Rifle Association (NRA), which pours millions of dollars into election campaigns in order to ensure political inaction. The NRA, which operates as a lobby group for gun manufacturers, also actively stokes gun-owners’ fears that liberal politicians will seek to…
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