‘We can really change the world’

Students favoring tougher gun laws eager to flex newfound political muscle in upcoming elections

Charlie Goodman looked at the massive crowd around him, the largest youthled protest in Washington since the Vietnam War era. He listened to people speak about toughening gun laws. They included some of his peers at the Florida high school who’ve sparked this movement, as well as the 9-year-old granddaughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King.

When she spoke, he was moved to tears.

“This is truly a revolution,” said Goodman, a sophomore at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were gunned down last month. “We can really change the world.”

The marches unified hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the country and have galvanized this movement, he and others say. Now they are vowing to get young voters registered and send a message in upcoming elections.

“We have a lot of people who are inspired,” said Kobey Lofton, a student from Chicago’s South Side who also traveled overnight to Washington on Friday with 12 busloads of fellow students and adults.

Before the march, Lofton and his fellow Peace Warriors at North Lawndale College Prep High School had already met with the Florida students — young people from different worlds, but both impacted by gun violence.

Now they and other students across the country are planning voter registration drives through the fall. Voter registration groups, including Rock the Vote, Voto Latino and HeadCount, a nonpartisan group that usually focuses on registering people at concerts and music festivals, also helped mobilize teams at Saturday’s marches in 30 U.S. cities and have created a registration tool kit for high school students.

“I’ve never felt the energy that I felt,” HeadCount spokesman Aaron Ghitelman said of the registration training that preceded the march in Washington. In a matter of hours, he said the groups registered nearly 5,000 people, many of them millennials.

“More young people are realizing that we can have a voice and we can have a seat at the table,” he said. “But people realize that you have to fight for that seat at the table.”

“We have to force them to do something,” agreed Lofton, who was referring to elected officials, including President Donald Trump. The White House issued a statement about the student-led march and also pointed to the president’s support for the Stop School Violence Act, which authorized grants to schools to bolster security and attempts to improve background checks.

But Cameron Kasky, a student leader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, says the current laws and legislation don’t go far enough.

The students, he said, are demanding an assault weapons ban, prohibition of sales of high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.