Never Again Movement for Gun Laws
Parkland Shooting: Where Gun Control and School Safety Stand Today
The Parkland students became a force for gun control legislation and boosted the youth vote. Here's how they changed America's response to mass shootings.
On Feb. 14, 2018, a former student slaughtered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
The next day, David Hogg, a student who survived the attack, expressed his frustration at the pattern of political inaction that seems to follow mass shootings in the United States. He was not surprised that there had been another school shooting, he said, and that fact alone "says so much about the current state that our country is in, and how much has to be done."
"We need to do something," he said. In the course of the next year, students would change the way the nation handles mass shootings, spurring new gun legislation and school safety measures, and holding to account the adults they felt had failed them.
Here's a look at where they made those changes happen, and where they were disappointed.
The Students Take the Lead
With Parkland, it was the students who set the agenda. Their openness about their pain made them formidable leaders of the movement for gun control, and their displays of strength and utter grief struck a chord with a nation numbed by repeated acts of violence.
In the weeks after the shooting, busloads of Stoneman Douglas students took their case to the Florida capital and to Washington. With a rallying cry of "Never Again," they gathered support from other young people and activists, and their March for Our Lives campaign spurred huge rallies and hundreds of protests, including a nationwide school walkout. The students' pleas reached the White House, imploring President Trump to better protect schools and limit access to guns.
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What Makes #NeverAgain Different?
The protests calling for stricter gun control measures come on the heels of other youth movements, but the momentum they have gained makes them stand out.
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"Children are dying." "I will fight every single day." "I just want to speak." "We call B.S." These students survived a shooting at their school. Now they're leading a national movement for stricter gun control. Just days after the shooting, they called for school walkouts around the country, traveled to the Florida State Capitol — "You failed us" — and planned a nationwide march. Some of them can't even vote yet. It's clear these students are doing things differently. Here's how. #NeverAgain is leveraging social networks to mobilize faster than most movements before it, according to experts who study the rise of social and political movements. One week after the shooting, the #NeverAgain Twitter handle is verified and has more than 81,000 followers. In just a few days, student leaders have crowdsourced more than $3 million through online campaigns and celebrity donations. They're also handling their own crisis control by directly responding to critics. "I lost a best friend who was practically a brother, and I'm here to use my voice because I know he can't." These survivors are presenting their personal stories of loss as part of their fight, converting grief into power by getting in the face of adults. "So, Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the N.R.A. in the future?" The #NeverAgain movement wasn't formed in a vacuum. It's riding on the most recent wave of youth activism, which picked up speed around 2010. Student protests ebbed after the antiwar movement of the '60s and '70s. "We are fed up." Young people today are getting involved to change systemic inequalities they were raised to believe had already been taken care of. The Dreamers, students against sexual assault, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter movement all had strong involvement by college-educated millennials. These groups have had modest success. President Barack Obama made sure campuses did more to investigate cases of sexual assault. And he later protected Dreamers from deportation. "You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law." It's too early to tell if the #NeverAgain movement will sustain the momentum it needs to bring tangible change. But it's an election year, so politicians might find their demands difficult to ignore.
The Adults Are Held to Account
Stoneman Douglas students and parents were outraged by what they viewed as gross incompetence on the part of school and law enforcement officials. Video showed that a sheriff's deputy assigned to the school did not enter the building as the attack unfolded. Seven other deputies remained outside as gunshots rang out, a state commission found. And another officer prevented paramedics from entering.
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The school district also appeared to have missed several warning signs about the former student charged in the massacre, Nikolas Cruz. The parents of two 14-year-old students who were killed decided to run for the school board to fix what they thought went wrong. One of them won.
And in January, Florida's new Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Sheriff Scott Israel for his "neglect of duty" and "incompetence." Mr. Israel, who is a Democrat and a vocal opponent of the National Rifle Association, continues to insist that the criticism of him is politically motivated and that "there was no wrongdoing on my part." Multiple deputies have also been suspended, and one ultimately resigned.
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At that time, there was no law in Florida that would have prevented Mr. Cruz from buying a gun or would have allowed the police to take away his weapon. A gun control bill the state passed in March now allows law enforcement — with judicial approval — to bar a person deemed dangerous from owning guns for up to a year. Florida courts granted more than 1,000 such orders in the first nine months after the law took effect, according to The Associated Press. Eight other states have passed similar "red flag" laws in the last year, bringing the total with such laws to 14. Several more states are expected to take up measures in 2019.
Gun Control Proves Harder at the National Level
State legislatures, both Republican- and Democratic-controlled, passed 76 gun control laws in the past year — from bans on bump stocks and caps on magazine sizes to new minimum-age requirements and expanded background checks. Among the victories for gun control advocates was an omnibus bill in Florida that raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm in the state to 21 and extended the waiting period to three days. In all, more than half the states passed at least one gun control measure in 2018, with Washington and New York joining the trend in 2019.
At the same time, there were significantly fewer new state laws expanding gun rights in 2022 than the year before, according to an end-of-year report by the national advocacy group Giffords. Data provided by the N.R.A. also indicated that the number of enacted gun control measures outnumbered pro-gun measures for the first time in at least six years.
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How the N.R.A. Fought Gun Control After Parkland
After the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people, the N.R.A. used its political clout and a powerful P.R. campaign to fight gun control efforts.
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It was supposed to be the mass shooting that finally galvanized the country and forced lawmakers into action: 17 people dead after a massacre inside a high school. Emotional calls for gun reform. "I want to feel safe at school." Then, in came the N.R.A., with a slick campaign and access to the Oval Office, to grind momentum almost to a halt. So how did the N.R.A. pull this off? The president needs N.R.A. endorsement to rally his support base, especially in an election year. Because of that, the N.R.A managed to secure meetings with Trump in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, when calls for reform were the loudest. The N.R.A. has catchy, succinct slogans that are easy to remember and drive their point across. "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun." After Parkland, the N.R.A. spokesperson went head to head with student victims on TV. "Well, I think the A.T.F. is deciding about bump stocks right now. The president ordered the D.O.J. to look into it." "I'm asking your opinion as a representative of the N.R.A." "That's what the N.R.A.'s position has been. The N.R.A. came — "What's yours?" "I'm talking for them. These are the 5 million members that I'm here representing." And on the group's own channel they broadcasted stuff like this: "These kids ought to be marching against their own hypocritical belief structures. They hate machines that cause death except, hold on, no, you ain't never going to take their cars away. They hate the idea that guns save lives, except the only reason we've ever heard of them is because guns didn't come soon enough." The N.R.A. aggressively mobilized a membership drive a few weeks after Parkland. "Now is the time for all of us to join together in defense of the principles that make America the greatest nation on earth." They claim to have over 5 million members. But that figure has not been confirmed by any outside party. After Parkland, Florida lawmakers passed the first significant gun control bill in more than 20 years: raising the age limit to buy rifles from 18 to 21. The N.R.A. promptly filed suit. The calls for gun reform after the Parkland shooting haven't stopped, and neither have the N.R.A.'s efforts to thwart them.
In the end, the only significant national change was a ban on bump stocks — which members of both parties had been calling for since the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017.
The House of Representatives, where Democrats took power in January, has now made gun safety a priority, and the Judiciary Committee passed two gun-control bills on Wednesday that would strengthen background checks and close a loophole that allowed Dylann S. Roof to buy a gun that he used in the Charleston church massacre in 2015. But with a Republican Senate and president, the chances of either measure moving beyond the House are virtually nil.
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Allow School Personnel to Have Access to Weapons, Report Says
President Trump read the recommendations of the Federal Commission on School Safety, which played down the role of guns in school violence.
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Today, we are reviewing the recommendations put forward by the School Safety Commission. These include: Fixing mental health laws so that families and law enforcement can get treatment, immediately, to those who need it; encouraging states to adopt extreme risk protection orders, which give law enforcement and family members more authority to keep firearms out of the hands of those who pose a danger to themselves and to others; launching a "no notoriety campaign," which would encourage the media not to use the names, or frankly anything having to do with the shooters. Supporting local efforts to create a culture that cherishes life and fosters deep and meaningful human connections, allowing highly trained school personnel to have access to firearms. Nothing is more important than protecting our nation's children.
The president voiced support in the days after Parkland for arming teachers with guns as a way to prevent further massacres. It was an early indicator of the tack that he and congressional Republicans would take in addressing the shooting. In March, Mr. Trump announced the creation of a federal commission to examine school safety proposals, including raising the minimum age for buying certain firearms. But two months later, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos informed a Senate committee that the commission would not look at the role guns play in school violence. Its final report played down the role of guns, and advised schools to improve mental health services and train school personnel to use firearms.
Madison Leal, a student at Stoneman Douglas, said in March about politicians who would not take action: "I'm going to vote them out of office. And so is my entire generation. And they'll be sorry then."
In the summer, a busload of students traveled the country on a Road to Change tour aimed at registering young voters. In tandem with various voter groups and celebrities promoting registration, the Parkland students helped spike record numbers for young voter registration, registering thousands of voters at their rallies. The March for Our Lives campaign reported a 10 percent increase in youth turnout in 2018, compared with the previous midterm elections in 2014.
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Two dozen pro-gun candidates were defeated in contests for House seats, though 88 of the 129 candidates backed by the N.R.A. did win. Gun control featured prominently as an issue in the midterms, and underdog candidates like Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jason Crow of Colorado and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia won seats in the House after campaigning strongly for gun control measures.
One thing was clear from the midterms: Young voters were energized. The results of that may continue to be felt in the years and decades to come.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/us/school-shootings-parkland.html
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