Politicians owned by the NRA may still be saying it’s “too soon” after the latest mass shooting to talk about gun control, but apparently “about a week” is just the right amount of time for those on the right to come after the survivors, who have demanded action in a way that one would think nobody could deny. Survivors who have demanded action have a closeness to the situation that grants them a unique authority on the matter, and one would think that nobody could deny them. Nobody could possibly dismiss these survivors, these children, after what’s happened. Nobody could be that terrible in the face of such tragedy.
Enter the conservatives from stage left.
Over the weekend, really gross Facebook posts started popping up, trying to cast doubt on the intelligence of Douglas High students, but they initially came from the fringe, right down the street from the factory where the tinfoil hats are made.
But this week, we’re hearing these same nonsense theories and dismissals in the mainstream, and we’re hearing them from government officials, not just on 4chan or InfoWars. Rather than accept the possibility that children who just survived a shooting would fight to ensure nobody else ever goes through what they did, GOP pundits, aides, and politicians are grasping instead at the Trumpian™ Method: deflect and discredit. (And in one Texas school, they’re also using threats to stifle student outrage.)
They were coached, they cry! They’re too articulate, they say! They can’t possibly have formed these conclusions on their own! They couldn’t possibly organize like this on their own! They’ve been hijacked by the left, you see!
Wrong answer. And it's going to bite the right in the butt. HARD.
Campaign Action
The very oldest teenagers at the time of the 1999 Columbine massacre are now old enough to run for president, and the very youngest babies are old enough to vote, after a lifetime of school shootings being their norm. And anyone who was at least 13 years old—and many who were 12—when Sandy Hook happened can vote in the 2018 midterms.
According to U.S. Census estimates, there were 16,760,947 14-17 year olds in July 2016. Even if just half of those children turn 18 before Election Day, that’s more than 8 million new young voters eligible for November’s midterms. And every one of them will be eligible to vote for president in 2020. (Whether or not they will actually vote is, of course, a completely different conversation.)
In short, an entire generation of young voters has only existed with school shootings as a real threat to their young lives. Tens of millions of children who grew up with active shooter drills alongside their fire drills. It’s deplorable to dismiss their cries for help and action as “phony.”
This is a generation that has only existed in a world where politicians continuously fail to protect them–whether it’s by making the very act of researching mass shootings illegal by refusing to repeal the Dickey bill, whether it’s by failing to pass gun reform again and again and again, or, as Florida’s state legislature did on Tuesday, by refusing to pass a motion to discuss an AR-15 ban.
The ripple effect of these decades of inaction is yet to be seen at the polls, but at least one research model indicates that things that happen to us when we are young are three times as impactful as those that happen in adulthood, and shape our political leanings for life.
The model assumes generations of voters choose their team, Democrats or Republicans, based on their cumulative life experience — a “running tally” of events. By using Gallup’s presidential approval rating as a proxy for those events, (data scientists) were able to estimate when political preferences are formed.
Events at age 18 are about three times as powerful as those at age 40, according to the model.
Millennials are poised to become the largest eligible voting bloc in 2018, and are already more liberal than every generation that came before them. By talking over the youngest of them, by dismissing their cries for help,and their demands that the grownups Do Something, the GOP (and Democrats as well) are in danger of pushing away this increasingly motivated incoming youth vote.
Actions speak louder than words, and “thoughts and prayers” are just words. While the right refuses to believe these kids could form their own opinions about the violence they’ve always known, the best thing the left can do is listen to these kids and fight for them.
The Parkland students (and students across the nation) are showing us just how smart young people are, in case we’ve forgotten what it was like to be young. They’ve experienced something so few of the adults in the room have. As a result, despite their young age, their experiences help them recognize the cycle of death our nation is trapped in, and they are determined to convince us all, as the adults, to break it.
And if we don’t break it for them, there’s a mighty good chance that they’ll smash it themselves.
Florence Yared, a 17-year-old survivor of last week's school shooting, has a message for Congress.
"You are directly responsible for every community that has lost people to gun violence, and you have the power to change this. If you don’t, then we will change you," she said at a rally in Tallahassee in front of the Capitol moments ago.
"We are too young to vote, but soon we will be able to vote, and we will vote you out. Many students throughout the country can’t wait to go vote, can’t wait to run for office, to make a change, to make a safer world," she said.
As one Iowa student told ABC: “Not all of us can vote … not all of us do have that say, but we will eventually.”
And come their first Election Day, whether that’s in 2018 or 2020, it looks like they’re coming for anyone who takes money from the NRA. It’s up to the left to not only fight for our young people, but prove that we’re listening to them...and motivate them to get to the polls.
You can find out when young people are first eligible to register to vote in your state here.