In a video posted to YouTube, 24-year-old school shooting survivor David Hogg points to a whiteboard and outlines a five-step plan to reshape America. 

Ever since Hogg survived the 2018 Valentine’s Day shooting at his Parkland, Florida, high school, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he’s become a national leader in the push for gun control and a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that has raised nearly $8.5 million in the past year to elect Gen Z and millennial progressives to state and national office. 

The PAC aims to find young Democrats running for office, flood their campaigns with cash, offer strategic advice, provide a team of volunteers and work with the candidates to build a winning platform.

The strategy, Hogg explains in the YouTube advertisement designed to attract donors, has already met with success in Texas: “We just did this, electing the youngest person to the Texas state Senate, Molly Cook,” the state’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator. Leading up to the May election, Hogg’s PAC bolstered Cook’s campaign with $300,000 in financial backing, money used to blanket her district with mailings and digital ads.  

“With Molly, we found in our poll that she was behind by 2%, so we came in and we found that she was ahead by 5 after we informed voters about her background,” Hogg says, adding that his team knocked on the doors of more than 1,000 potential voters. “We got her on MSNBC as well and worked with her on her messaging and the result is that she ended up winning by 62 votes.” 

As Hogg works to “elect a ton more Mollys around the country,” an analysis by Âé¶čŸ«Æ· of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how he has leveraged the trauma and lessons learned from surviving one of America’s deadliest school shootings to build out a well-connected, generously funded operation to influence elections. 

The urgency of his key issue remains unabated: were killed and at least nine others injured Wednesday in a shooting at a Georgia high school. During a presidential campaign stop Wednesday afternoon in New Hampshire, Vice President Kamala Harris called the shooting outside Atlanta “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.”

“It’s just outrageous that everyday in our country — in the United States of America — that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It’s senseless,” Harris said. “We’ve got to stop it.”

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. Its efforts going into November will almost certainly be strengthened by Harris’s presence atop the ticket, an event that has .

Joining forces with Hogg, a recent Harvard graduate, is Kevin Lata, the former campaign manager of U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida who, at 27, is the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress. Hogg and Lata didn’t respond to interview requests.

“As a generation, we’ve collectively been told to run, hide and fight over and over during active shooting drills, and our generation has learned that along with our ABCs,” Hogg says in one ad. “I think it’s time that we repurpose the meaning of that. We need to start running for office. We need to stop hiding from the responsibility that we have to protect future generations.”

Cook has received the largest share of direct campaign cash from Leaders We Deserve, according to the PAC’s most recent federal financial disclosures, which cover the period from June 2023 to the end of July 2024. In that time, the group has helped finance the campaigns of 16 candidates, primarily at the state level, including in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Florida and Ohio. 

Funding has gone to the Georgia House race of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, a former Miss Texas vying for a state House seat on a gun control platform, a 28-year-old in Pennsylvania whose run for the state House is centered on , and a 28-year-old mother running for a House seat in Tennessee after the state .

‘Pain into purpose’

Though young candidates are underrepresented in public office across the country, and they tend to face steeper financial barriers than those from older generations, FEC data — and Hogg’s five-step plan — show the PAC offers more than money to its endorsed candidates. It has ties to some of the major players in Democratic campaign operations. 

Its 59-person advisory board encompasses education leaders, gun control proponents, youth activists and two former law enforcement officers — — who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Donald Trump supporters. Democratic politicians, half of them 35 or younger, make up the largest share of advisors. 

Among the more seasoned advisors is Arne Duncan, the former education secretary for President Barack Obama. Duncan now has his own group — Chicago CRED — which provides job training and other resources in a bid to stem gun violence in his hometown. 

Duncan told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that he and Hogg communicate regularly to discuss their shared goal of thwarting gun violence. Duncan said that his “generation has failed” to confront the issue in a meaningful way, leaving young people — including the ones Hogg is working to elect — to devise solutions. 

“I hate the leadership that David has had to provide on this issue. I hate the trauma that he and his classmates and his school and his community have been through,” Duncan said. “But I so appreciate him turning that pain into purpose and really fighting to change things.” 

Hogg— who co-founded the gun control group in the Parkland shooting’s immediate aftermath and has campaigned in previous elections for candidates who support new gun laws— has garnered financial support for his political committee from marquee donors. The bulk of donations — more than $4.3 million — come from undisclosed individuals contributing less than $200, but the largest single contribution of $300,000 is from Ron Conway. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist and gun control proponent served on the advisory board of , which has sought to reduce campus gun violence in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. 

Other prominent donors include reproductive rights activist Phoebe Gates, the daughter of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who gave $75,000, and actress Kate Capshaw and her husband, the director Steven Spielberg, who donated a combined $25,000. 

That support, federal election data shows, has translated into significant spending, with nearly $3 million going to advertising via text messaging, digital ads and campaign mailers. Nearly $1 million — the PAC’s second-largest expense — was used to purchase lists with the contact information of potential voters. 

The PAC’s expenditures also reflect the web of influential players working behind the scenes. Leaders We Deserve paid nearly $130,000 in legal fees to the Elias Law Group, the firm of Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, who and is now assisting with the party’s vote recount strategy for November. Other top payments were to prominent political fundraisers and strategists, including The Hooligans Agency, with using Hollywood tactics to make viral political ads.

PACs like Leaders We Deserve have faced criticism for injecting smaller races with big money from interest groups and out-of-state donors. Leaders We Deserve has found its greatest success raising money from donors in California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York, federal data shows. The group hasn’t contributed to candidates in any of those states. 

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Leaders We Deserve advisory board member, said the PAC offers Hogg a strategic advantage.

“He did this in a way so that he wasn’t constrained by party,” Weingarten said. “He understands and knits together policy and politics.” 

‘A big barrier’

Even with its list of established connections, Leaders We Deserve faces headwinds in driving change. 

Young people are “vastly underrepresented on the ballot” and run for public office at much lower rates than older adults, according to from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning Engagement, or CIRCLE,  a nonpartisan youth-focused research organization at Tufts University.

As of 2021, millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — made up a quarter of the voting population yet  of lawmakers in Congress. Researchers found that financial insecurity and structural inequities — not apathy — were behind the divide. 

While more than 20% of young adults 18 to 25 said they would consider seeking public office — and an increasing number of them have followed through in the past decade — the encouragement they receive varies widely by race and gender. Younger candidates are more diverse than those from older generations, but while Black and Latino youth are more likely than their white counterparts to consider an election bid, they are less likely to actually run. 

The data drives home why groups like Leaders We Deserve are critical to improving civic engagement among young people, said Sara Suzuki, a senior researcher at CIRCLE.

“That gap between interest and actually running can be filled by organizations like Leaders We Deserve and other organizations across the spectrum because financial support is a big barrier,” Suzuki said, adding that the PAC’s explicit encouragement of young candidates could lead more of them to enter politics. 

Getting the necessary votes is another story. Suzuki said it’s plausible that a candidate’s age is one of the factors that young people consider at the ballot box, but that they are primarily driven by specific issues rather than individual candidates or parties. 

“They really vote as a way to make change happen on issues that they care about,” she said, “and those issues tend to be economic issues like cost of living, climate change is a big youth issue, gun violence and abortion.” 

‘Leaders for 2050’

The PAC’s went to the congressional campaign of Sarah McBride, a Democratic state senator in Delaware since 2021 who has been on transgender rights. If elected, the 34-year-old would be the first openly transgender member of Congress. 

“Everyone deserves to feel safe in their community, whether you are walking alone at night or going to school during the day,” McBride notes on her campaign website. “The truth is, when it comes to guns, our country has lost its common sense.” 

The PAC’s  “first elected candidate,” according to Hogg, was Nadarius Clark, the youngest member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Clark got $100,000 in support and beat his Republican opponent by 800 votes in 2023. Leaders We Deserve and the ideologically aligned nonprofit were Clark’s top campaign contributors, show.

The PAC stands to see another victory, where Bryce Berry — the 22-year-old Atlanta middle school math teacher — faces an incumbent from Democrat to Republican last year in order to support private school vouchers. The heavily Democratic district has never elected a Republican to the state House. 

Leaders We Deserve has also been handed defeats, including its failure last fall to help elect a 26-year-old transgender woman to the Alabama House of Representatives. The PAC spent $124,325 on the race, one that Hogg acknowledged would be tough. 

But the group is looking well beyond 2024’s high-stakes election cycle, a strategy that Duncan, the former education secretary, said is critical to the Democratic Party’s future. The state lawmakers elected today, he said, are one step closer to becoming the national leaders of tomorrow. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

It’s a political mindset that the group hopes will propel progressive leaders beyond their Republican rivals.

“While MAGA plans for 2025,” one of the PACs ads states in reference to Trump’s ties to the to remake the federal government, “we’re building leaders for 2050.”

The mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, a student who was killed in her English class during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, stood before a room full of lawmakers and state officials on Wednesday. 

Lori Alhadeff held a portrait of her daughter in her arms as she applauded Utah for becoming the sixth state to pass “Alyssa’s Law,” legislation mandating silent panic alarms in classrooms that are directly linked to law enforcement.

“We are taking momentous steps forward in safeguarding our children’s well-being,” Alhadeff said, adding the bill represents “our collective commitment to providing a secure learning environment for every child in Utah.”

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Anti-school shooting bill

The 2024 Utah Legislature last month passed , and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on March 12. The sweeping school safety and security bill includes not only “Alyssa’s Law,” but also creates a set of uniform, minimum safety standards all Utah schools must adhere to. It designates armed school employees as guardians, requires threat reporting if employees are aware of a particular safety concern, and links the state’s SafeUT Crisis Line to Utah’s intelligence database.

To enact HB84, the Utah Legislature approved $100 million one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding.

To highlight HB84 — along with seven other bills packaged together as legislation that will benefit Utah’s future generations — Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson ceremoniously signed the bills on Wednesday at the University of Utah’s Bennion Center.

HB84’s sponsor, Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden, said his bill is meant to address a reality in the U.S. that “isn’t going away for us.” School shootings, he said, are not a tragedy that “we can pretend isn’t happening.”

He thanked the parents of the Parkland, Florida shooting victims for helping craft Utah’s legislation and ensuring “when our kids go to school, all they’re worried about is learning rather than catastrophic violence.”

“That isn’t something that they should have to worry about. But it is something that we do,” Wilcox said. “It is a responsibility of parents, the schools, of the adults who can do a lot more to prepare and make sure that they don’t have to worry about it.”

Henderson stood in for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who originally was expected to attend the signing but was unable to due to a family emergency. His wife, first lady on Wednesday to remove degenerative discs in her neck after “weeks of debilitating pain,” according to the governor’s office.

Henderson applauded HB84 and other bills aimed at improving opportunities for Utah’s youth and parents.

“We are a family friendly state,” Henderson said. “We care about our children, our educators, our education system. We care about the future. And this is an opportunity that we put our money where our mouth is.”

The full list of bills Henderson ceremoniously signed included:

• provides $1.5 million to provide instruction on child sexual abuse and human trafficking. It was supported by the nonprofit , which hopes it will help reduce sexual abuse.
• allows a state employee to use parental leave for a variety of reasons, including time for a child or an incapacitated adult with whom the employee is assuming a parental role, including foster care. It also allows a state employee to use postpartum recovery leave to recover from a childbirth that occurs at 20 weeks or greater and provides flexibility so they don’t have to use the leave in a single continuous period of time.
• uses $8.4 million in one-time state money to increase the amount of funding available to teachers for classroom supplies. It provides $500 to go to elementary school classroom teachers and $250 to go to middle and high school teachers specifically for classroom supplies.
• mandates school districts to develop paid leave policies for parental and postpartum recovery. It requires a minimum of three weeks off for someone adopting, becoming a foster parent, a grandparent taking custody, or a spouse of someone giving birth, as well as requiring six weeks of paid postpartum leave for Utahns who give birth.
• uses $8.4 million to give stipends of $6,000 to support educators while they’re full-time student teachers.
• raises legal standards in child custody cases with the intention of protecting kids from abusive parents. It was named “” after Leah Moses’ 16-year-old son, Om Moses Gandhi, who was murdered by Moses’ ex-husband.
• uses over $100 million in one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding to increase .  uses $3.3 million to create a pilot project called the , which provides stipends and scholarships to young adults who participate in a year of community service, according to the University of Utah. Participants would receive an hourly stipend and a $7,400 scholarship in exchange for 1,700 hours of service with an approved partner organization.

She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”

The images were pivotal to an unprecedented conviction this week that legal scholars predict could create a new tool for prosecutors as the nation looks for ways to stem a record-setting uptick in mass shootings.

“This is the last picture we have of that gun until we see it murder four kids on Nov. 30, and the person holding it is Jennifer Crumbley,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said before a jury convicted the mother on four counts of involuntary manslaughter — one for each of the students her son gunned down at Oxford High School. 

“She’s the last person we see with that gun,” McDonald said. 

Crumbley is the first parent to be held directly responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child, turning on its head a bedrock legal principle: People cannot be held responsible for the actions of others.

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

And if other parents are charged in connection with shootings acted out by their children, Yankah said, the Crumbley conviction may make them more likely to accept a plea deal behind closed doors.

“Prosecutors will be tempted to use this power in ways that we don’t see,” he said. “A prosecutor is going to sit across from a parent when people are crying out for somebody to be held accountable and the prosecutor is going to be able to say, ‘I’m offering you three years to five years in prison, but if you don’t take this deal, I will prosecute for 15 years.’ ” 

For gun control advocates and the parents of children killed in their classrooms, the landmark trial’s outcome was welcomed. Craig Shilling, the father of Oxford shooting victim Justin Shilling, told a local TV station the conviction is “definitely a step towards accountability.” About three-quarters of school shooters obtain their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to a . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible. 

The conviction is in many ways a watershed moment that hinged heavily on portrayals of Crumbley as a neglectful mom who paid more attention to her horses and an affair than to the son she’d gifted a gun to as he struggled with his mental health and exhibited violent behaviors. 

In this case, the gunman was charged as an adult while his mother was found guilty of crimes that stemmed from her role as an egregiously aloof and reckless parent. The gunman pleaded guilty in October 2022 to 24 charges, including first-degree murder and terrorism causing death, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December. 

The shooter’s father, James Crumbley, is scheduled to face a similar trial next month. 

Yankah, the UMichigan law professor, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· he wasn’t aware of any other cases where a parent was held liable for the crimes of a child who was simultaneously considered “a legal agent” and therefore responsible for his own actions. 

It’s not the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Still, experts said the Crumbley case does present a significant escalation in a generations-long push to hold parents accountable for the misdeed of their kids.

One , published in the Utah Law Review in 2008, noted that such efforts appeared cyclical, noting that “every couple of decades or so” lawmakers claimed to “discover” the idea of holding parents to account for teenage crimes. 

Punishing parents

which impose civil or criminal liability on adults under the premise that their failures to take control as parents led to their kids’ bad acts. There is research that ties youth delinquency to poor parenting. 

One recent parental responsibility law, , specifically addressed guns. It imposed civil liability on parents for negligence or willful misconduct if they allow their minor children to use or possess guns if the child has been adjudicated delinquent, was convicted of a crime, has the propensity to commit violence or intends to use the weapon unlawfully. 

Efforts to hold parents accountable for their children’s behaviors are rooted in the very origins of the nation’s juvenile justice system in the early 1900s, which authorized the state to intervene when parents failed in their duties, and their constitutional implications. By the 1970s, the report notes, lawmakers began to place a greater emphasis on parents as a factor in juvenile crime and turned to

Little is known, however, about whether such efforts have been effective in reducing juvenile crime. Eve Brank, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that she is unaware, after decades of researching the emergence of parental responsibility laws, of “any empirical research that shows that imposing punishments on parents because of the actions of the children will decrease juvenile crime.”

She is also unaware of any data indicating how frequently those laws are used. In 2015, she , who reported infrequent enforcement. Through her research, Brank has identified three types of such laws: civil liability, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and parental involvement. 

Under the statutes, parents can be held responsible for helping or encouraging their child to commit a crime and financially liable for damages. They can also be required to pay fines or attend parenting classes due to their children’s criminal acts. 

Among them are truancy laws, which require students to attend school. In New Jersey, for example, parents who don’t compel their children to attend school can face disorderly conduct charges and fines. Such efforts, however, have been heavily criticized — including during the 2016 presidential election when Vice President Kamala Harris was that imposed jail time and fines on parents in truancy cases while she served as state attorney general. 

In 2017, Pennsylvania lawmakers reformed state truancy rules and made them less punitive after a Reading County woman was found dead in 2014 while serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy because she was unable to pay a $2,000 fine. 

“Many of those statutes came under a lot of strain in the last say 15 years,” including ones around truancy, Yankah said, adding that people were skeptical about whether they addressed the root causes underlying the social problems they sought to address and could uphold long standing racial disparities in the judicial system. “Frankly, communities of color really learned that — as is so often the case — when we pass more criminal statutes the people who are in the crosshairs are politically vulnerable. It was a lot of Black mothers, and so those statutes kind of faded out of popularity.” 

In some cases, parental responsibility laws have failed under court scrutiny. Among them is an ordinance in Maple Heights, Ohio, that for “failing to supervise a minor” if their child committed what would be considered a misdemeanor or a felony if it had been carried out by an adult. The in 2008 after a parent faced charges after her 17-year-old son was accused in juvenile court of carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest and failing to comply with a police officer. 

Meanwhile, officials have also sought to hold parents responsible when their children bully other kids. In 2016, the city council in Shawano, Wisconsin, passed an ordinance that on parents who failed to address their child’s harassment directed at other kids. 

In a high-profile cyberbullying case from 2013, a Florida sheriff bemoaned his of a girl who was charged criminally for harassing a 12-year-old classmate so relentlessly online that it led the girl to die by suicide. Among the harassment was an online message encouraging the 12-year-old to “drink bleach and die,” yet the parents continued to give the bully access to social media. 

“I’m aggravated that the parents aren’t doing what parents should do,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters at the time. “Responsible parents take disciplinary action.” 

A new category of parental responsibility

Crumbley’s conviction, Brank said, “doesn’t fit into any of these categories” of traditional parental responsibility laws and is instead a first-of-its-kind extension of the manslaughter statute. 

As officials seek to crack down on mass shootings, the Crumbley case is one of several recent examples where prosecutors sought to hold parents accountable when their children carried out what once were unthinkable acts of violence.

In December, a Virginia mother was for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son brought a gun to his Newport News elementary school and shot his first-grade teacher. In a separate prosecution, the mother pleaded guilty to using marijuana while owning a firearm and for making false statements about her drug use. 

In a separate prosecution that may have laid the groundwork for the Crumbley case, to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges that stemmed from a shooting carried out by his son at a 2022 Highland Park Independence Day parade, which left seven people dead. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license. 

At the time of the massacre, the gunman was too young to apply for a firearm license so his father sponsored his application despite knowing his son had a history of behaving violently. Several months before the attack, a relative reported to police that the teenager had a large collection of knives and had threatened to “kill everyone.” 

In the Highland Park case, was explicit: The father’s guilty plea, he said, should be a “beacon” to others that parents can be held accountable for the actions of their children. 

“We’ve laid down a marker to other prosecutors, to other police in this country, to other parents, that they must be held accountable,” Lake County State Attorney Eric Rinehart said. “The risk of potentially losing this innovative prosecution — and not putting down any marker — was too great for our trial team.” 

Yankah said it’s important to look at new parental accountability efforts through their historical contexts. 

“Looking back at history,” he said, “shows us that our historical experiments with this kind of liability for parents has rarely solved the underlying problem,” he said. “Maybe this kind of case will have an effect, maybe parents will be more attentive. But to speak honestly, I think what a case like this shows is how many different things we as a society have to work on if we really want to be free of this violence.”

What began as a modest community on the social media platform quickly grew into the political juggernaut Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots gun control group and a primary foe of the National Rifle Association and their allies in Washington, D.C. 

After fighting in the political trenches for more than a decade, Watts plans to retire this year after a long-fought win: Last year, President Joe Biden signed into law the first new federal gun rules in nearly three decades. 

But the mass shootings haven’t stopped. On Wednesday, students nationwide marched out of their schools to demand additional gun control measures after a shooter killed six people — including three 9-year-olds — March 27 at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville. This week, Tennessee House Republicans three Democratic state representatives who led a protest on the House Floor in response to the shooting and in solidarity with the hundreds of demonstrators, many of them young people, who packed the Tennessee Capitol.

The Nashville shooting has become the latest partisan flashpoint at the center of the country’s divisive political discourse. As students in Nashville and nationwide flood the streets to demand additional gun control measures, Republicans have latched onto the tragedy, which was carried out by a 28-year-old transgender shooter, with anti-trans rhetoric. 

In an interview with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Watts — who now lives in California and whose children are grown — said the GOP’s response to the Nashville shooting follows a long history of leaning on “straw men” to avoid an honest dialogue about gun violence. She also offered insight into the power of mom-led advocacy and advice for parents advocating for changes in their own communities.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

This week it’s students who are walking out of school and hitting the streets protesting after the recent school shooting in Nashville. But we’ve been here before. What, if anything, is different this time? What factors have made this shooting in Nashville so politically galvanizing? 

I think it’s different every time. There’s this idea that somehow there’s going to be a tragedy and everything is going to change overnight. And it didn’t happen after Columbine, it didn’t happen after the Sandy Hook school shooting, it didn’t happen last summer [after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas]. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing. 

The system is not set up in this country for overnight change. The system is set up for people to get involved in democracy and that means that you do what I call the unglamorous heavy lifting of grassroots activism, and that forces incremental change. 

I have seen over the last decade incremental change lead to a revolution. There’s been a seismic shift in American politics. Back in 2012, a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Today, not one does. They’re proud of their Fs. 

And we had 15 Republicans support the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last summer. So things are changing and I believe that after every national shooting tragedy, when people start to pay attention, you’re seeing change.

The NRA is incredibly weak. They really didn’t have a seat at the table when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed. The fact that we have a 90% track record of stopping the NRA’s agenda every year, those things are only enabled by all of the change that has happened and added up over the last decade. 

When you ask what’s different this time, I think it’s that there are even more people who are filled with rage over this situation, who know we don’t have to live like this. We sure as hell shouldn’t die like this. The more people who use their voices and vote on this issue, the faster we get to a place where our country isn’t run by the gun industry. 

President Biden signed the first federal gun control measures in nearly three decades — yet these shootings keep happening. What do you see were the effects of the law that has been signed, and what more needs to be done to solve the problem? 

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a very important, critical step forward, but it was just one first step on a much longer journey. 

We need to have background checks on all gun sales at a federal level, we need a Red Flag law, we need to make sure that domestic abusers can’t get guns, including stalkers. There’s so much that needs to be done, and we’ve done it really at a state-by-state level. 

Blue states in this country now have pretty strong gun laws, whereas red states don’t. We’re only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws, so we need much more to happen at a federal level. But in order to do that we have to have a Congress that will make that happen. 

The idea that shootings were going to stop after the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed is not realistic, but I want to be clear that it is meaningful. It takes a multifaceted approach to looking at gun violence as a complex issue. It isn’t just mass shootings or school shootings, that’s about 1% of the gun violence in this country. It’s also domestic violence and gun suicide and community gun violence. 

You asked what’s happened since the law was passed. The fact that we have stepped up background checks through the FBI through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 119 buyers under the age of 21 have been blocked from gun sales because they were deemed too dangerous to have access to guns. Prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers. There are new gun trafficking penalties that now have been used in at least 30 cases across the country. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children in schools and into community violence intervention programs. 

President Biden said after the Nashville school shooting that he on the issue without Congress at this point. What is your response to this admission? 

I think that was a little more nuanced. I think he was basically saying that if we want holistic solutions for gun safety it really does have to be passed by Congress. I also want to be clear that the Biden-Harris administration has done more on this issue than any other administration in our nation’s history. 

Right now, the House is controlled by gun lobby lackeys. They’re not only opposed to passing good gun safety laws, they’re actually attacking federal law enforcement and they’re pushing gun extremists’ laws that would put us at risk. Just hours after the shooting in Nashville, a House committee scheduled a vote on legislation that would make it easier to buy really dangerous assault weapons that have arm braces. It’s the same device that the shooter in Tennessee had. 

So you know, I want to be clear that we’re making progress. If you’d asked me a year ago that we would have passed the first gun safety bill in 30 years that expanded background checks and funded state Red Flag laws and helps close what we call , I would not have believed you. 

So it is possible, and I think it’s inevitable, that our lawmakers at a federal level will eventually take action on this issue because their constituents are demanding it. There was a reason that Mitch McConnell whipped the votes on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and that’s because he saw polling that showed the Republican Party would be decimated if they did not act after Buffalo and Uvalde. That trend, especially when you see shootings like what just happened in Nashville, will only continue. 

We’re seeing more and more gunfire on school grounds in this country and we know why. It’s because there’s unfettered, easy access to guns.

The Nashville tragedy was carried out by a person who was reportedly transgender. As such, many Republican lawmakers and pundits have blamed the shooting on the suspect’s gender identity — rather than on guns. In what ways are you working to counter efforts to divert the focus from firearms to other social issues?

We see these same straw men after every single shooting tragedy in this country. Republicans always want to make it about anything but what data shows is causing our uniquely American crisis, which is easy access to guns. You know, other nations have mental illness, they have access to video games, they have divorced parents. 

The reason we have a 26-times higher gun homicide rate is that we give people easy access to guns. You know, the vast majority of mass shootings in this country have been by straight white men. And at no point have they said that that is a crisis, that we should really look at straight white men. It’s clear that that is just a way for them to divert attention because what they don’t want to talk about is the fact that too many guns and too few gun laws have given us the highest rate of gun homicides and suicides among all high-income countries. 

Gun politics have long been divisive and you’ve found yourself the subject of sharp political critiques and, most alarmingly, death threats. There’s evidence of the country growing increasingly divided, and with that an uptick in political violence. In what ways have you experienced this change firsthand? 

When I started Moms Demand Action, I was sort of living in a bubble. I was a white suburban mom and I got off the sidelines because I was afraid my kids weren’t safe in their schools. Then when you come to this issue, what you realize is that it is much more complex and much more holistic than that. 

I was really shocked that we were having rallies and marches in those early days in Indiana and we were surrounded by men who were carrying loaded long guns in public. I was just shocked that that was legal. And in fact, open carry is legal in over 40 states in this country. To me it was a signal that something is very wrong. 

The more and more we pushed on gun extremists, the more they pushed back by behaving that way and we saw them starting to open carry in stores which is why we started corporate campaigns to change their gun policies. What we were starting to see were the seeds of gun extremism. They felt like a right not utilized and expressed in public was a right they didn’t have, and the NRA actually pushed back on this idea. In 2014 they came out and ‘downright weird,’  and said it was not something that you do in normal society. And then just days later, they had to change their position because gun extremists in Texas were burning their NRA membership cards. 

Every state has its own version of the NRA but it’s often to the right of the NRA and much more extreme. When I lived in Colorado, they’re called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. They believe any gun law whatsoever is an infringement on the Second Amendment. So the NRA tends to be pulled to the right by these extremists. I mean, in 1999, the NRA opposed guns in schools and supported closing the background check loophole. And certainly that’s a far cry from where they are today. 

They’ve lost control of their Frankenstein, and gun extremism is now this recruiting tool. It’s an organizing principle, it’s a fundraising tactic all for the right wing. I mean, guns excite the right-wing base about things that have nothing to do with guns. And so it is getting young white men through the door, it is radicalizing them, these groups often play in conspiracy theories. Again, some of those were originated and propagated by the NRA. 

The goal is to stoke fear, recruit new members and sell guns. Those fringe gun extremists that our volunteers were facing in those early days started showing up at state houses and anytime a statue was being removed and even threatening lawmakers and police officers and fellow citizens.

We’ve tracked armed demonstrations since 2020 and found that they’re six times more likely to be violent or destructive than demonstrations where people are not armed. It seems pretty intuitive, but the data bears this out. 

So to answer your question: Yes, I think gun extremism is on the rise and is a very dangerous threat to democracy.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles deleted a recent family Christmas card from social media after you criticized the photo, which featured the lawmaker and his family wielding guns. Republican lawmakers have faced similar criticism in recent years for posting similar family portraits. Why do you think it’s important to highlight these images? Are you concerned that the attention may ultimately play into their hands? 

I think it’s fascinating when these gun extremists back down, like deleting the photo. I think it’s really important to point out that this is the culture that’s killing us. 

This idea of unfettered access to guns and treating them like toys, like putting them in the hands of children. Both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans. They were responsible gun owners, they had the highest amount of respect for those guns and in a million years would not have posed with them like they were toys as opposed to tools meant to kill things. 

It’s really important that we shine a light. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s certainly the case when it comes to gun extremism because people see this behavior. The vast majority of Americans — regardless of whether they’re gun owners or not, regardless of whether they’re Republicans or Democrats — they support common sense gun laws. And I think that seeing that kind of gun extremism is a turnoff to most Americans and they know that’s not who they want making our policies. 

You began your advocacy after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 with a Facebook group. What is it about grassroots, mom-led advocacy — based on the idea behind Mothers Against Drunk Driving — that makes it a particularly effective gun control advocacy approach? 

Bigger picture, women are the secret sauce to advocacy in this country and frankly, in the world. If you go back to when women were first allowed to be activists in America, which was Prohibition 
 they [men in power] could never really put that genie back in the bottle. Once women got off the sidelines, they wanted to use their voices on issues that they cared about. 

We are often given the task of caring for our families and our communities. All the way from Prohibition up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, it’s really been women and mothers forcing change in this country and using the power available to them. We are the majority of the voting population, we’re the majority of the population — period.  So when we use our voices and our votes, we can affect change. 

I often go back to something that feminist author Soraya Chemaly said. She wrote and she featured Moms Demand Action in there and she and I had a conversation about this and she said, ‘You know, 80% of the lawmakers in this country are men and men are inherently afraid of their mothers.’ 

The lawmakers in this country are either very, very excited to see us show up — hundreds or even thousands of us at a time in our red shirts — or they’re very, very afraid. So that can be a powerful coalition. 

Given your success in taking that Facebook group and turning your advocacy into the size of the organization that you did, I’m curious what lessons you learned about American politics and policymaking? What advice do you have for other mothers and other women who are working to inspire change in their own communities? 

I don’t think that men are as afraid to fail in public because that’s sort of seen as brave and courageous, where I think women feel like there’s blowback when they’re not perfect, or if they fail. 

If I had waited until I knew everything there was to know about gun violence or organizing, I still wouldn’t have started Moms Demand Action. I think it’s important to birth your ideas into the world. The very worst thing that can happen is that you fail and that you learn from that failure and you try something again. 

I had this great reverence for lawmakers before I started Moms Demand Action and I assumed they were very smart and committed and concerned and kind and unfortunately what you learn is that too many of them are not and they really don’t want to listen to what you have to say. But if you are an activist who is all of those things — concerned, committed, compassionate, curious — you would make a great lawmaker. I’m very proud of the fact that hundreds of our volunteers have decided to take a leap from not just shaping policy but to actually making it and running for office and winning. 

In this last electoral cycle, in November, 140 of our volunteers ran for office and won at all levels of government. We have volunteers who are now members of Congress. I think that’s a really important lesson, too, which is that women make great lawmakers. 

After more than a decade in this work, at the end of this year you plan to retire. What motivated that decision and what’s next for you?

I’ve been a full-time volunteer, it’ll be 11 years at the end of this year, and that’s a long time to do this work. But also, I’ve asked myself that question because I think it’s important for a founder’s role to be finite. I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life doing this work. I’m so honored and so proud to have sort of lit the spark, but it really is up to other new and emerging leaders to keep that going. 

This movement needs to last into perpetuity and so, by stepping back, I think I enable other leaders to step forward. I’ll still be a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, I’ll just be doing it as a California Moms Demand Action volunteer. We have leaders who are ready to step up inside the organization and outside the organization, and I think that’s really exciting. 

As for me, for what’s next, I obviously will always care about this issue and it will be very important to me and I will use my voice in different ways. Something I’m really passionate about is empowering women in all different ways, but particularly running for office. 

I don’t have an answer for you on specifically what’s next. I will be with Moms Demand Action through the end of the year, I will certainly rest a little bit and I’m going to be teaching at USC starting in January and, other than that, I’ll figure out what’s next when the time comes. 

One in 4 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours, according to published Monday. Nearly half of those teens said it would take them less than 10 minutes.

“That’s a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said , a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another . On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was in February while sitting in his car outside the school.

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The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.

“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.

The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent’s permission?”

American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.

Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.

The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.

The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.

Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.

Teens particularly vulnerable

Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.

“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said , a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”

While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.

“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said , a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”

Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.

“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said , a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”

If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.

The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.

“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.

This originally appeared at .

(Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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A trio of GOP gun measures won approval from lawmakers Wednesday, including a measure that would allow people with concealed weapon permits to bring firearms onto Arizona school campuses.

The Judiciary Committee in the state House of Representatives passed three bills put forward by pro-gun advocates. The committee is chaired by Rep. Quang Nguyen, R-Prescott Valley, who for the Arizona Scorpions Junior High-Power Rifle team and also serves as president of the Arizona State Rifle and Pistol Association.

, sponsored by Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise, prohibits a school board from restricting a parent or legal guardian from having a firearm on school property if they have a concealed carry permit.

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Shamp told the committee that the current law barring weapons on campuses has affected herself and “quite a few of her constituents” who had gotten emergency calls about their children and forgotten about a firearm they were concealing either on their person or in their purse.

Gun control advocates who showed up to the meeting in large numbers did not feel the bill was appropriate.

“I’m opposed to the presence of guns in schools, from kindergarten to colleges, which (the bill) would allow,” Anne Thompson, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action, told lawmakers. Thompson also pointed to metal detectors and security in the House of Representatives, which bars visitors from bringing in weapons, questioning why lawmakers wouldn’t want similar protection for children at school.

Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, expressed his frustration to Thompson over the metal detectors, saying that he has spoken to House leadership about having them removed. That prompted Nguyen to declare that he was currently practicing his “Second Amendment right” so everyone in the committee room was “safe.”

Mary Cline, president and co-founder of the Students Demand Action chapter at University of Arizona, shared the story of how her father, who was the principal of her school, used a firearm in a domestic violence incident with her mother. Her father also allowed firearms on his campus.

“We’ve had a lot of bills like this come through our committee in the 11 years that I’ve been here,” Rep. Lupe Contreras, D-Avondale, said. “One thing that I have heard time and time again is that more guns in people’s hands in a situation of that magnitude is not always the safest thing to have.”

Contreras argued that more guns on school campuses, which saw the this decade, would only make problems worse. That sentiment was echoed by his other Democratic colleagues.

Rep. Melody Hernandez, D-Tempe, said she is concerned about accidental deaths on campuses. In the last five years there have been related to guns being mishandled in schools.

Proponents of the bill, like Kolodin, said it was about the government not restricting a constitutional right while also not criminalizing parents.

“Why are we making these good, law-abiding citizens into criminals?” Kolodin said.

The bill has already won approval along party lines in the Senate and heads next to consideration by the full House.

Silencer or ear protection?

But SB1331 wasn’t the only gun measure heard Wednesday morning.

Another proposal that cleared the GOP-controlled committee was , which aims to get ahead of possible future federal legislation on gun laws. Silencers and muzzle suppressors are legal in Arizona, though they are considered a class 3 firearm, which requires a . Rogers’ bill removes existing  that conforms with federal guidelines around the equipment.

“This is a simple bill. It reinforces our right to have this kind of device on a firearm and it keeps it from being on a prohibited list,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, the bill’s sponsor, told the committee Wednesday, adding that critiques from Democratic members that these devices would make mass shootings deadlier are not “germane” to the bill.

“How is that not germane?” Rep. Analise Ortiz, D-Phoenix, asked Rogers.

“These aren’t the silencers that you see on a James Bond movie,” the Flagstaff Republican retorted.

Rogers argued that silencers are needed so that help hunters and competitive shooters don’t damage their hearing, although both Rogers and the experts she brought to testify admitted they were not an “audiologist” or health professional.

Silencers are available to gun owners in the United States but they have to be registered to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and get approval with the agency. There were 28,942 in Arizona in 2016 and over 1 million registered nationwide. However, state law disallows such devices.

The bill heads next to the full House for debate. It previously passed out of the Senate on a party line vote, with only Republicans in support.

Can’t discriminate against the NRA

After the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, banks like JPMorgan Chase and CitiGroup began distancing themselves from the firearm industry. Last year, lawmakers began retaliating.

Texas that bars state agencies from working with any firm that “discriminates” against companies or individuals in the gun industry and the law also requires banks, as well as others, to state that they will comply with the law.

Now, , by Sen. Frank Carroll, R-Sun City West, aims to do the exact same thing in Arizona.

The Texas law has had major repercussions for the state, as JPMorgan underwrote a large number of the state’s bond deals. Now, billions of dollars in bonds are up in the air due to the legislation and it is estimated to have cost the Texan in interest.

“We aren’t opposed to gun manufacturers or anything like that,” Ryan Boyd, a lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Counties, told the committee about the group’s opposition to the bill. Boyd noted the loss of underwriters Texas has seen as a result of its law and the impact it could have on county treasurers across the state who have to use larger financial institutions for their contracts.

And Jay Kaprosy, a lobbyist representing the Arizona Bankers Association, said that banks are not distancing themselves from gun industries to “infringe on the Second Amendment,” as some lawmakers have suggested, but as part of “risk management” practices. Kaprosy also pushed back against claims that firearm industry groups have not been able to secure new banks after certain banks have left them.

“There are a number of banks that have picked this up as a niche where they have aggressively seeked this out,” Kaprosy said.

Those representing the firearm industry said differently.

“It takes a lot of time to change millions upon millions of dollars of transactions and to move that stuff over,” Michael Findlay, a lobbyist for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said to the committee. Findlay said that gun manufacturer Ruger had to move their bank in Arizona. Ruger is worth nearly $1 billion.

The bill has already passed out of the Senate along party lines and will head to the House next for a full vote.

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“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”

“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you 
 don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim 
 they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of at least 19 children and two teachers, unfolded just 10 days after the nation was shocked by a mass shooting that left 10 people dead at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. 

It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. A research theory called the contagion effect suggests that mass shootings often happen in clusters, with intense media coverage playing a significant role in subsequent attacks. About a dozen studies, dating to the 1970s, suggest this is the case.

The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings in just 10 days, including the carnage in Buffalo and Uvalde. That’s according to , which tracks shootings that result in at least four injuries or deaths. So far this year, the U.S. has endured 212 mass shootings in which four or more people were shot or killed, according to the archive. 

The tragedy in Texas has reignited the country’s divisive and cyclical debate over gun laws, with President Joe Biden asking in an emotional White House address Tuesday night, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York Oswego, said shooters are often motivated by a desire for fame. She’s a proponent of the “, which urges media outlets to limit the frequency with which they publish a shooting suspect’s name and photograph.

Attackers “want people to know who they are, they want their name recognition, and so when we remove that incentive and we don’t report their names, we aren’t rewarding people for killing other people by making them celebrities,” Schildkraut said. “It’s also removing the incentive for other like-minded individuals who may be seeing the amount of coverage that a case is getting and want similar attention.”

A day after the May 14 Buffalo supermarket assault, four people were killed and 23 were injured in five mass shootings: two in Texas, two in North Carolina and one in California. In one incident, a at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, resulting in one death and five injuries. In another, two people were killed and three injured after in Houston. More recently, on Monday, in a shooting at a club in North Charleston, South Carolina. 

While the Buffalo and Uvalde suspects are both 18-year-old men, a motive for the Texas school shooting remains unknown, as does the degree to which the perpetrator studied or was inspired by the incident in upstate New York or elsewhere. But Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, noted that the Texas suspect was active on social media and reportedly outlined plans on Facebook prior to the attack. The suspect and communicated with a stranger online before the shooting, offering a cryptic message about what would soon unfold. Lankford said the suspect appeared to portray himself “as a mysterious, dangerous man who might do something like this.” 

“He was dancing around the possibility that seemed likely that he would do something dramatic, perhaps dangerous, and perhaps a mass shooting,” Lankford said. “You can only dance around or imply that in a culture in which people are aware that young men with firearms too often do that.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators. 

In one 2015 study on the contagion effect, researchers at Arizona State University found a in the immediate aftermath of a similar attack with four or more victims. A second incident was statistically more likely to occur within 13 days, on average, researchers found.

Yet a similar contagion effect doesn’t appear to exist in the wake of attacks with just a few victims, “possibly indicating that the much higher frequency of such events compared with mass killings and school shootings reduces their relative sensationalism, and thus reduces their contagiousness,” according to the researchers.  

So far this year, 27 shootings at K-12 schools have resulted in 67 injuries or deaths, according to , which has tracked such attacks since 2018. Prior to the shooting in Uvalde, the most recent campus attack unfolded just last week in Kentwood, Michigan. In that May 19 tragedy, after a Crossroads Alternative High School graduation ceremony.

In recent years, mass shootings in the U.S. have become “substantially more deadly over time,” by Lankford. Shooters often take inspiration from previous attacks and apply the lessons learned to their own. In fact, the number of mass shootings where eight or more people were killed since 2010, compared with the previous four decades.

The number of shooters who were inspired by previous attackers has also doubled, Lankford found. Between 1966 and 2009, a quarter of the deadliest shootings were perpetrated by someone who directly cited, referenced or studied a previous mass killer. Such direct influence was observed in half of the deadliest shootings between 2010 and 2019. 

Older attacks seem to have a stronger direct influence than more recent events, Lankford said. The Buffalo suspect, for example, reportedly referenced the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in writing. Lankford noted that mass shooters often conduct extensive research and planning before carrying out their attacks and are unlikely to act impulsively after learning about the most recent shooting on the news. Rather, at-risk individuals who have already been considering violence could see the latest headline and decide that now is the time to act. 

The rise of social media, Lankford said, has helped researchers understand how transmission occurs. 

“We’re increasingly able to study the social media and internet searches of the perpetrators themselves, so what was in previous decades mere speculation about transmission can now be confirmed,” he said. “So, as just one example, we know what the Parkland shooter was googling and that he was looking up both things like the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooters, but then also a shooting that had just occurred several weeks earlier.”

While many questions about the Texas shooter remain unanswered, Schildkraut said it’s important to focus attention on the victims and their needs. 

“There are so many people in years past who can tell you the names of shooters and not one of their victims, let alone all of their victims,” she said. “We just really need to refocus the attention on who matters in this, and it’s not the person who did the killing.”