The teenagers taking on the gun lobby
Conservatives have a well-rehearsed response to mass shootings, said Amanda Marcotte on Salon. They offer thoughts and prayers, claim it’s “too soon” to talk about gun control, and wait for the news cycle to move on. It’s an effective way of deflecting public debate. But in the wake of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida, it isn’t working. The teenage survivors of the shooting have refused to go away. They’re voicing their rage on television and social media. A speech by student Emma Gonzalez to a rally has gone viral. There are now plans for a nationwide student walkout and a march on Washington. Thrown by this challenge, the “right-wing noise machine” has resorted to trying to discredit the teenagers, baselessly claiming that they’re paid actors or puppets of the billionaire liberal activist George Soros.
I’ve covered most of the past two decades’ mass shootings in the US, said Dave Cullen on Politico, “and I have never seen anything like these Parkland kids. This one seems different.” The lack of reform after recent massacres has bred a defeatist belief that nothing will ever change. But perhaps there is hope after all. One thing’s for sure, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times: this battle won’t be won on social media. Change will only come when gun control activists generate the “raw electoral power” to threaten the same sort of pain as the National Rifle Association, which has spent more than $200m over the past 20 years helping favoured candidates get elected and opponents get ousted.
The best outcome activists can hope for in the short term is incremental change, said Christina Cauterucci on Slate. The “kinds of sweeping restrictions that would actually make a significant dent in gun deaths” would probably fail in the Supreme Court even if they did make it through Congress. However, the long-term picture is brighter. A study of presidential voting found that events that occur when a person is between the ages of 14 and 24 have a huge effect on their political views compared with events at other ages. Today’s teenagers, born after the Columbine shooting of 1999, which sparked a horrendous cycle of school shootings, have lived their whole lives under this spectre, having to practise “active shooter” drills. Now they’re witnessing their peers on television, standing up to politicians and saying enough is enough. The Parkland children will surely win in the end.