By Sunday, only four days after the school shooting at Marjory StonemanDouglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, the activist movement thatemerged in its aftermath had a name (Never Again), a policy goal(stricter background checks for gun buyers), and a plan for a nationwideprotest (a March for Our Lives, scheduled for March 24th). It also had apanel of luminary teens who were reminding America that the shooting wasnot a freak accident or a natural disaster but the result of actualhuman decisions.
The funerals continued in Parkland and surrounding cities—for thestudents Jaime Guttenberg and Joaquin Oliver and Alex Schachter and thegeography teacher Scott Beigel—with attendance sometimes surpassing athousand people. On a local level, at least, the activism did notovershadow the grieving. The tragedy affected this student body of morethan three thousand people in different ways: some students lost theirclosest friends, others hallway acquaintances. And the student leadersknew, with the clarity of thought that had distinguished them from thebeginning, that the headline-industrial complex granted only a verynarrow window of attention. Had they waited even a week to startadvocating for change, the reporters would have gone home.
Also, different people express grief in different ways. The activistsare grieving, too, but it’s not a coincidence that a disproportionatenumber of the Never Again leaders are dedicated members of the dramaclub. Cameron Kasky is a theatre kid. Before he went on Anderson Cooper,he was best known as a class clown. “I’m a talker,” he told me. “Theonly thing I’ve had this whole time is the fact that I never shut up.”Kasky started writing Facebook posts in the car after he and hisbrother, who has special needs, were picked up after the shooting bytheir dad. “I’m safe,” he wrote in the first, posted two hours after theshooting. “Thank you to all the second amendment warriors who protectedme.” For the rest of the day, in between posts about missing studentsand recalling the experience of hiding in a classroom with his brother,Kasky’s frustration grew: “Can’t sleep. Thinking about so many things.So angry that I’m not scared or nervous anymore. . .I’m just angry,” hewrote. “I just want people to understand what happened and understandthat doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that conceptwas so difficult to grasp?”
The social-media posts led to an invitation from CNN to write an op-ed,which led to televised interviews in the course of the day. “People arelistening and people care,” Kasky wrote. “They’re reporting the rightthings.” That night, Thursday, after the candlelight vigil ended, Kaskyinvited a few friends over to his house to try to start a movement.“Working on a central space that isn’t just my personal page for all ofus to come together and change this,” he posted. “Stay alert. #NeverAgain.” He had thought of the name, he later told me, “whilesitting on the toilet in my Ghostbuster pajamas.” In early interviewsKasky had criticized the Republican Party, but he and his friends haddecided since that the movement should be nonpartisan. Surelyeveryone—gun owner or pacifist, conservative or liberal—could agree thatschool massacres should be stopped. The group stayed up all nightcreating social-media accounts and trying to figure out what needed tobe said, “because the important thing here wasn’t talking about gore,”Kasky said on Sunday. “It was talking about change and it was talkingabout remembrance.” It was then that they decided to petition for morethorough background checks. As Alfonso Calderon, a co-founder of NeverAgain, who was there that night, told me, “Nikolas Cruz, the shooter atmy school, was reported to the police thirty-nine times.” He added, “Wehave to vote people out who have been paid for by the N.R.A. They’reallowing this to happen. They’re making it easier for people like NickCruz to acquire an AR-15.”
Further Reading
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
They launched their new Facebook page just before midnight on February15th. “Thank you to everybody who has been so supportive of ourcommunity and please remember to keep the memory of those beloved peoplewe’ve lost fresh in your minds,” Kasky wrote.
While Kasky, Calderon, and their other friends huddled among snackwrappers in a gated-community war room, another student was developing adifferent plan. Jaclyn Corin is the seventeen-year-old junior-classpresident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She woke up the morning after theattack to the confirmation that her missing friend, Joaquin Oliver, wasamong the dead. She cried so hard that her parents had to hold her down.She also started posting on social media. “PLEASE contact your local andstate representatives, as we must have stricter gun laws IMMEDIATELY,”she wrote on Instagram. It was after she went to grief counselling, andafter the candlelight vigil that evening, that Corin first talked tothe Democratic Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Conversationswith state representatives followed, and preliminary arrangements weremade to bus a hundred Douglas students and fifteen chaperones toTallahassee to address the state legislature. Yesterday, I asked Corinif she had been politically active before the shooting. “Not even alittle bit,” she said. “It’s so personal now. I would feel, like,horrible if I didn’t do anything about it, and my coping mechanism is todistract myself with work and helping people.” Corin was also preparedto advocate for gun-law reform, having worked on a fifty-page projectabout gun control for her A.P. composition-and-rhetoric class a coupleof months before. “We have grown up with this problem,” she said, when Iasked how the students had been so ready to argue the issue. “We knewthis stuff. It’s not like a new, fresh horrible thing that’s happening,it’s been preëxisting even before we entered the world.”
By Friday, Corin had accepted an invitation from Kasky to join forcesunder Never Again. By Saturday, other students who had beenindependently talking to the media about gun control had joined, too—names that are now becoming familiar to the American public: David Hogg,the reporter for the school paper who appeared on national newsbroadcasts the morning after the shooting demanding action from electedofficials; Sarah Chadwick, whose profanity-laced tweet criticizing Trumpwent viral soon after the shooting; and Emma (“We Call B.S.”) González,whose speech became the defining moment of a gun-control rally in FortLauderdale on Saturday. González, a senior, gave her first CNN interviewon the night of the vigil. The invitation to speak at the rally hadfollowed, and she wrote her speech the day she gave it. She had notanticipated how widely it would be shared. (Her last experience ofactivism, she told me, had been last year’s underwhelming March forScience.) She had simply written down the thoughts she had been sharingwith her friends. “This is how I’m dealing with my grief,” she said.“The thing that caused me grief, the thing that had no right to cause megrief, the thing that had no right to happen in the first place, I haveto do something actively to prevent it from happening to somebody else.”Kasky recruited Hogg and González for Never Again at the rally, where healso spoke.
“We said, ‘We are the three voices of this.’ We’re strong, but togetherwe’re unstoppable,” Kasky said. “Because David has an amazing composure,he’s incredibly politically intelligent; I have a little bit ofcomposure; and Emma, beautifully, has no composure, because she’s nottrying to hide anything from anybody.” “All these kids are drama kids,and I’m a dramatic kid, so it really meshes well,” González added.
