Gun protests offer hope the NRA can be routed
WASHINGTON >> For several hours on Saturday, cynicism was banned from the streets of what on many days seems to be the most cynical city in the world.
Throngs estimated at 800,000 or more gathered because a group of determined, organized and eloquent high school students asked them to come, and because too many Americans have been killed by guns.
Suddenly, hope-mongers were stalking the nation’s capital. They believed, against so much past evidence, that the National Rifle Association could be routed.
The crowd seemed to expect it would require an election to usher in the reforms they seek. “Vote them out!” was a dominant chant. All along the march route, clipboard-wielding volunteers sought to register the faithful so they could cast ballots to achieve that end.
Cameron Kasky, one of the heroes of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mobilization, began his speech saying, “Welcome to the revolution.” His promise was peaceable and refreshingly practical.
“The voters are coming,” he declared.
Cynicism, of course, was quickly restored. Tired complaints discounted the March for Our Lives visionaries who hit the pavements across America on Saturday.
But the cynics may be wrong, even if the fight ahead will be as hard as they say. To begin with, Saturday’s marches achieved something that has never been accomplished before. Guns have long been a voting issue for those who insist that any and every restriction on firearms is a danger to freedom. These marches finally established guns as a voting issue for those who place saving innocent lives ahead of preserving unlimited access to weapons.
The Stoneman Douglas activists altered the terms of the nation’s quarrel over guns. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people” the old NRA slogan goes. “Actually, guns do kill people,” read a placard at the D.C. march.
The new revolutionaries make the essential argument that our current approach to firearms undercuts the rights of the unarmed far more than any restriction would ever impinge on the rights of gun owners. The NRA imagines a nation of universal gun-toting, an idea brilliantly mocked by Alex Wind, a student speaker who asked: “Are they going to arm the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney?”
The political character of this movement is another change. No phony bipartisanship. No pretending that everyone approaches this issue with good will. Thus “Vote them out.” Thus casting the NRA as the adversary and all who welcome its money and support as complicit.
Their agenda is clear, as is the price of resisting it. As Kasky put it: “The people demand a law banning the sale of assault weapons, the people demand we prohibit the sale of high-capacity magazines, the people demand universal background checks. Stand for us or beware.”
Finally, this march established the gun safety alliance as multiracial and intersectional, reaching far beyond its traditional base among suburban white liberals. Few speakers were more powerful than 11-year-old Naomi Wadler. She declared that young African-American women who were victims of gun violence would no longer be “simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.”
In 1960, the nation’s attention was captured by young civil rights activists who sat in to integrate lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is not romanticizing the young to say that at times in our history, only those not beaten down by the defeats of the past could find the courage and the strategic initiative to win old fights in new ways. On a crisp and beautiful spring day we witnessed a new dawn in the struggle to end gun violence.