Youths take lead on issue
To Bay Area children well-rehearsed on how to react if a heavily armed gunman tries to kill them in class, what happened in Florida seemed — at first — like just another school shooting.
There have been so many, said nine student organizers this past week as they sat around a conference table at their Oakland high school. Why would this one be different? And then, as if someone hit a switch, everything changed.
Teens across the country heard the gunshots and screams recorded on cell phones by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. They watched survivors their own age take to social media
and cable news, delivering elected officials an ultimatum: Either help us stop this or lose your job.
Within hours of the Feb. 14 massacre — allegedly committed by a 19-year-old ex-student armed with a legally purchased assault rifle — the students around the table at Bishop O’Dowd High School were among those who responded.
They and students across the Bay Area planned marches, hijacked class time to discuss their fears and plans, called lawmakers at lunchtime and resolved to stay at it for as long as it will take to tighten gun laws and fight to prevent more mass shootings.
“This generation is a sleeping giant,” said Bishop O’Dowd senior Kameela Hall, “and we have woken up.”
It is a political coming-ofage moment for members of a generation born in a postColumbine world, who say they are realizing — after dozens of similar rampages across a span of nearly 19 years — that politicians have done little to protect them. They’ve made “never again” a vow and a hashtag.
“I think the reason it hit so hard this time is because it’s becoming a normalized thing, a part of everyday life hearing about a shooting on the news,” said Sawyer Shine, a senior at Tamalpais High in Mill Valley.
There, students held a candlelight vigil after the Florida shooter killed 17 people. Then they organized an action plan on gun control and school safety.
“It’s our reality, and we don’t really want to accept that at all,” Shine said. “Now, it officially has become too much.”
The teens have offered a fresh, and strikingly unintimidated, perspective on the calcified debate over gun control and gun rights in America. Their powerful position as victims and potential ones, and their skill at amplifying their messages on social media, have not been lost on the adults.
It isn’t unusual for teens to play a part in social movements. Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for doing the same thing there.
Vietnam War protests were sprinkled with high schoolers, though their numbers were dwarfed by college-age peers. Bay Area high school students have long fought for local issues, protesting police brutality and education budget cuts.
But to have high school kids at the vanguard of a national movement “is highly unusual,” said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford and author of “Deeply Divided: Social Movements and Racial Politics in Post-War America.”
“What they’ve done already is quite remarkable,” McAdam said. “But the question is, how long can this be sustained?”
The Parkland students claimed the spotlight within hours of the shooting. Senior David Hogg begged adults to do something. At a gun control rally two days later, senior Emma Gonzalez’s words echoed across the country.
“Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving,” she said. “But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.”
Survivors were soon meeting with President Trump and challenging lawmakers and the National Rifle Association at a televised town hall.
Centering a movement on high schoolers could present some drawbacks. Teenagers are at a transient age, and in a few months many will be headed to college or a job or the military. In the meantime, there are calculus tests, prom and weekend plans. Over the past week, however, many have said they are steadfast.
Teenagers can buy a prom dress and plan a protest at the same time, said Hall, the Bishop O’Dowd student. They are social media savvy, smart and a “ticking time bomb of voters,” she said.
The groundswell for meaningful gun control has been coming for a long time, said her classmate, junior Eli McAmis.
“From an activist perspective, when you’re trying to effect change in a democracy, the most important aspect is to not become jaded by the world around you,” he said. “This is not a group that is jaded.”
And they are not alone. On Tuesday, the massive progressive hub MoveOn.org solicited members to donate toward a $100,000 goal to help the student-led effort to end gun violence.
On Thursday, billionaire San Francisco activist Tom Steyer said he would contribute $1 million to helping register high school students to vote, focusing on districts represented by Republicans opposed to tighter gun control in California and Florida.
Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg announced they would donate $500,000 each to the March 24 “March for Our Lives” to be led by students in Washington, D.C. Clooney said he and his wife, Amal Clooney, were “so inspired by the courage and eloquence of these young men and women from Stoneman Douglas High School.”
The concern from organizers is that opponents will tag the students as puppets of liberal organizations in an effort to diminish their message.
“One of the ways to discredit a movement — any movement — is to say they’re naive or corrupt or in league with someone else,” said UC Irvine sociology Professor David Meyer, author of “The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America.”
The Oakland students scoffed at the idea that they are too young or too inexperienced.
“We are the people who experience this,” said Alden O’Rafferty, a Bishop O’Dowd junior. The Parkland students, he said, “know what they’re talking about because they watched their friends die in front of them. They know what they’re talking about because they heard the screams of their classmates as they ran through the halls.”
While students’ views vary, the evolving student movement has generally pushed for more gun control, including restrictions on high-powered rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines and an end to unregulated private gun sales — laws that now exist in California but not at the federal level.
Many students also want to improve support on campus, such as additional counselors, as well as anonymous tip lines and better classroom security, including functioning locks.
Arguably, the students have already achieved something that has eluded politicians — reopening the gun control debate. Some Republican politicians, including Trump, have said they may be open to modest changes in gun laws, such as increasing the legal age to buy rifles from 18 to 21.
Several student marches are planned in coming months, with administrators and teachers in many schools working with the students to find ways to participate.
Thousands of teachers are throwing support behind the students, including three in the Bay Area who formed a Facebook group, Teachers Take Action Against Gun Violence, that drew nearly 7,000 educators in just over a week.
They are sharing classroom curriculum around school shootings, creating opportunities for students to connect across states and lambasting the idea — voiced by Trump, among others — that a portion of teachers should carry guns at school, said Lyndsey Schlax, a social studies teacher at San Francisco’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.
“Things can happen pretty quickly when you have conversations across the country in real time,” said Schlax, who started the Facebook group with former kindergarten teacher Sonya Mehta and El Cerrito middle school teacher Sarah La Due. “Kids want to participate, but they aren’t always sure how.”
At Tamalpais High, teacher LesLeigh Golson said she will do whatever she can to support her students, noting that she was in college studying to be a teacher at the time of the Columbine shooting.
“I’ve wanted to do something for a long time, but the tide hasn’t been on our side,” she said. “I think we’ve been waiting a long time for critical mass to shift.”
She believes the teens have been inspired as well by the success of the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment — the “power of collective speaking out.”
At the conference table at Bishop O’Dowd, students said the movement can’t wait any longer.
“We’re going to leave a legacy,” Hall said, “rather than leave a lesson.”