Why the latest gun debate is different from the rest
Activists inject a passionate new energy, write Peter Baker and Michael D Shear
Around 2.30pm on Valentine’s Day, President Donald Trump was in the study off the Oval Office when John F Kelly, his chief-of-staff, arrived with news of a school shooting in Florida. Mr Trump shook his head, according to an aide, and muttered, “Again.”
Mark Barden was visiting a playground named for his seven-year-old son slain in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School when a friend texted him: Be careful watching television. It’s happening. Again.
His senator, Christopher S Murphy, Democrat, Connecticut, heard about the Florida shooting while he was on his way to the Senate floor and ripped up his speech to declare that through inaction, “we are responsible” for a mass atrocity. Again.
House majority whip Steve Scalise, Republican, Los Angeles, a gun rights supporter who was himself grievously wounded last year when a man opened fire at a congressional baseball practice, huddled with colleagues on the House floor reliving his horror. He knew what was coming: the activists who in his view would exploit tragedies like his to advance their anti-gun agenda. Again.
Within hours of the bloodbath in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students and adults were killed on Feb 14, the machinery of the American gun debate began grinding into motion.
By evening, one anti-gun group had mobilised and already sent out its first email: “RESOURCES + EXPERTS AVAILABLE: Florida High School Shooting.” Another group, Everytown for Gun Safety, founded and financed by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, activated the 1,500 members of its “survivors network,” and soon paid US$230,000 (7.2 million baht) for an advertisement in The New York Times shaming progun lawmakers.
The National Rifle Association followed its own playbook: remaining silent for several days — a recognition that its message might be unwelcome during the initial burst of grief. But it used its NRATV channel to argue to its members that more guns in schools could prevent massacres. Sales of bump stocks, which can make a semiautomatic weapon fire like an automatic, rose out of fear that they would be banned.
The battles waged after shootings in Newtown, Connecticut; Orlando, Florida; Las Vegas; and Sutherland Springs, Texas, began playing out all over, presumably heading toward the same stalemate.
But this time, a few things are different: The gun control side has developed a wellfinanced infrastructure that did not exist when Mr Barden’s son Daniel and other schoolchildren were fatally shot at Sandy Hook. Within days of the Parkland shooting, one anti-gun group flooded Florida lawmakers with 2,500 calls and 1,700 emails opposing a bill allowing guns in schools.
Another difference is an unpredictable president who belongs to the National Rifle Association and promotes the NRAfavoured solution of arming trained teachers but has also embraced a couple of modest gun-control measures opposed by gun rights groups.
And perhaps most dramatically, the WeCall-BS teenagers of Florida have injected a passionate new energy into a stale debate, organising demonstrations, flooding the statehouse in Tallahassee, confronting politicians and taking to TV airwaves with an intensity and composure and power rarely seen in recent years.
“The initial reaction was the same kind of sickened resignation — this is one of the worst ever, and this probably won’t be enough either,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a centre-left advocacy group in Washington.
“What has changed since then is the kids and the extraordinary, galvanising force they have become,” he added, interrupting an interview to take a call from his 17-year-old son, whose class was leaving
school to march to the White House. “No one knows when we are going to hit a tipping point on this issue. We may have hit it — we don’t know.
Still, veterans of both sides said the fundamental dynamics of Washington have not changed. If President Barack Obama could not pass gun control in a Democraticmajority Senate in 2013, months after Sandy Hook, they said, it was unlikely that Mr Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress would.
The rapid mobilisation of the antigun movement is a phenomenon that has evolved with the emergence of new lobbying groups filled with veteran political operatives and growing lists of supporters. By now they are used to it.
“There’s something necessarily robotic about how an organisation like ours, in a professional way, responds to a mass shooting,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, a gun control group founded by Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who was shot in the head in 2011.
But the response has been an outpouring of support. Moms Demand Action, the grass-roots arm of Everytown, has 100,000 volunteers in every state, with an email list of 4 million. Since the Parkland shooting, the group has added 75,000 members. In Georgia, 1,500 people turned up at the state capitol on Wednesday to lobby for gun laws, compared with 160 last year. In Minnesota, the group had 16 RSVPs before the shooting for a meeting on Tuesday; 300 people attended.
“When Sandy Hook happened, the gun lobby was ready for us. They had been preparing for 20 years to take down those parents,” Mr Murphy said, recalling that few Democratic lawmakers were willing to appear on television criticising the NRA. “There was no anti-gun movement. It just didn’t exist.”
Now, he said, “There is an increasingly mature political movement that can combine with the unique moral authority of the kids.”
At the White House this week, Mr Trump hosted an emotionally packed session with survivors of the Parkland shooting. Outside the White House, high school students gathered carrying signs with slogans like “Abolish the NRA”, and calling for legislation. “No more waiting!” one student said into a microphone.
Whether they change the outcome, the students have at least changed the debate. “It’s going to be traumatic for a long time,” said Mr Scalise, speaking from experience. “The fact that they want to get more engaged and find out what they can do to help to prevent this I think is courageous.”