NEW YORK (Reuters) - When they
got prayers and thoughts from U.S. lawmakers after a massacre at a
Florida high school that left 17 students and teachers dead, thousands
of young people turned to the country’s largest gun-control advocacy
group to learn how to make their voices heard.
Students
flooded Everytown for Gun Safety with calls after last week’s Florida
school massacre, prompting the creation of its first student branch, the
group said on Wednesday.
“We can do social media like
no one else,” said Sophie Herrmann, 18, a senior seeking to start a
Students Demand Action group at Benilde-St. Margaret‘s, a Catholic high
school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. “We are ready to take on the
fight.”
On Feb. 14, a gunman killed 17 people at a
Parkland, Florida high school, the latest in a long series of deadly
U.S. school shootings, stirring the nation’s long-running debate about
gun rights and public safety.
Survivors of the shooting
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have
emerged as the new faces of the gun-control movement and marched on the
state capital of Tallahassee on Wednesday to call for a ban on
assault-style weapons.
The youth-led protest movement
has rallied around the #NeverAgain slogan, attracted prominent celebrity
supporters and plans a rally in Washington on March 24.
They
are a generation born into a world where schools routinely practice
active shooter drills by having students lock the classroom door and
hide out of sight to try to prevent another massacre like the 1999
shooting in Columbine, Colorado that killed 13 or the massacre in 2012
in Newtown, Connecticut that left 26 dead.
The new
“Students Demand Action” branch is expected to try to lift a ban on
government research into gun violence, get out the notoriously absent
youth vote and even run for elected office themselves.
Students
Demand Action is set to hold its first-ever nationwide organizing call
on Wednesday evening, and participants anticipate the high school and
college student groups will take a different tact from their elders to
stop gun violence.
Students will likely push to restore
federal funding for scientific studies of firearms-injury prevention,
which has been choked off since 1996 by the so-called Dickey Amendment.
It
was sponsored by Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican who described
himself as the National Rifle Association’s “point person in Congress,"
after government researchers reported that people who kept guns in their
homes faced a nearly three-fold greater risk of homicide and a nearly
five-fold greater risk of suicide. (reut.rs/2sLHKC8)
Millennials
are far less likely than Baby Boomers to vote in mid-term elections in
November, so another expected focus of the student group will be getting
young voters to the polls, said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand
Action, part of Everytown, a 4 million member organization funded by
billionaire businessman and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“Not
only getting out the vote but registering new voters. Something like 4
million Americans will turn 18 before mid-term elections,” Watts said.
“They are chomping at the bit to vote on this issue.”
And,
if no candidate emerges to challenge an incumbent beholden to the
National Rifle Association, members of Students Demand Action will
likely be trained by Everytown to run for elected office themselves,
both Watts and Herrmann said.
“We are ready. If Congress isn’t going to fight for common sense gun remedies, then let us take those spots,” Herrmann said.
