Gun-control groups team with students to turn Parkland shooting anguish into activism

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WASHINGTON — The Valentine’s Day massacre that killed 17 at a Florida high school this month has ignited student-led campaigns against gun violence that have seen anguished teenagers lead rousing rallies, make impassioned appeals on network news shows and stage a “die-in” at the White House.

But, alongside those efforts, well-financed national groups are working to provide logistical and financial support to help turn that outrage into a sustained effort to rein in access to the nation’s deadliest guns. They also are hoping to transform that teen anger into votes that could shape November’s midterm elections for Congress.

“We want to make this a movement, rather than a moment,” said Shannon Watts, who oversees Moms Demand Action, part of a network of gun-safety groups aligned with former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In the two weeks since the deadly rampage at a Parkland, Fla., high school, Watts’ group has launched a new arm, Students Demand Action, and has added 115,000 new volunteers to its roster, more than doubling its active volunteer base.

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Watts said her group is working to provide logistical support to the Florida #NeverAgain students and others planning March 24 “March for Our Lives” protests in Washington and dozens of other cities.

“We are on the ground where all these marches are being held,” Watts said of her five-year-old organization. “We want to make sure they are as robust as possible.”

Other efforts under way include:

• School walkouts on March 14, organized with help from a “youth empowerment” arm of the Women’s March, the group that led nationwide protests against President Trump’s administration the day after his inauguration. The walkout, on the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, will last 17 minutes to memorialize the 17 lives lost there and to protest congressional inaction on gun legislation. 

A national group, The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is writing a curriculum on student activism for schools willing to do a “teach-in” on the walkout day.

• A second student walkout, this one scheduled to last most of the school day, is planned for April 20 to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in which two students killed 13 people before killing themselves.

• A voter registration drive led by three groups: Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group founded by former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, and the political organization founded by billionaire Democratic activist Tom Stever. The effort, aimed at registering high school students to vote on gun issues, is set to kick off on March 25, the day after the planned marches for gun safety. It will focus on communities represented by Republicans who have taken campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association and have voted “no” on gun-control bills.

• The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday will host an online training to help students and their families understand their legal rights should they run afoul of law enforcement or school authorities during the protests and walkouts.

The protest movement has grown dramatically since a cluster of anguished Stoneman Douglas students began speaking out in the days after the tragedy.

Brady Campaign officials joined forces with students to march on the Florida Statehouse earlier this month to demand action on guns. Celebrities such as George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey have pledged six-figure contributions to the effort. And a gofundme.com campaign started by Parkland student Cameron Kasky had raised nearly $2.8 million as of Wednesday morning.

Deena Katz, a producer of Dancing with the Stars and a Women’s March activist, is helping the teens and has filed an application with the National Park Service for the March 24 event, which organizers estimate will draw 500,000 people to Washington. She also has connected the students with a public-relations firm that is helping publicize the march and juggle their media appearances.

Several Stoneman Douglas students made the lobbying rounds on Capitol Hill this week, meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and other lawmakers. The students declined interview requests Tuesday as they made their way to and from closed-door meetings.

But Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents the Parkland area, said the teens pressed their case for bans on  "assault-weapons" and high-capacity magazines and urged lawmakers to enact universal background checks for gun purchasers.

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All the attention has sparked charges from some conservatives that the young people are little more than pawns for liberal activists. Earlier this month, former Georgia congressman Jack Kingston said left-wing groups were using the students. “Their sorrow can be very easily hijacked,” he said on CNN.

An aide to a Florida state representative lost his job last week after falsely claiming that the outspoken Parkland students were crisis actors.

“It’s such an insult for them to assume that,” Watts said of the criticism from the right. “These are almost adults, and they have been impacted by a horrific tragedy. They want to lead, and they are leading."

Marco Vargas, an 18-year-old high school senior from Los Angeles joined Students Demand Action last week and plans to help lead a March 14 walkout at his school. Moms Demand Action, which recently held an organizing call for new student leaders, is helping provide the young activist-in-training with statistics on gun violence and PowerPoint presentations, he said.

But the passion to confront gun violence is his own, Vargas added.

Several months ago, a 17-year-old friend survived a gunshot wound to the chest during a domestic violence incident that left her father dead. Then, two weeks ago, he watched the gruesome scenes in Parkland play out on his television screen. Last week, his school was on lock-down after reports of a gun on campus. Drills to prepare students for an active-shooter scenario have become more common, he said.

“We’re preparing for the worst. It’s sad. It’s becoming a culture,” Vargas said. “Everyone is enraged and wants to take action.”

Kelly, a retired astronaut, became a leading gun-control advocate after Giffords, his wife, survived a gunshot wound to the head while meeting constituents in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011. The duo launched their gun-safety group in January 2013, just weeks after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Despite intense lobbying by gun-control groups and appeals from then-President Barack Obama, the Senate that April rejected bipartisan legislation to expand background checks and a slew of other measures pushed in response to Sandy Hook.

Kelly traveled to Tallahassee earlier this month to meet with the Parkland students and to share his experiences as they staged protests at the statehouse. The survivors of gun violence want to be "part of the solution," he said, but often don't realize the roadblocks they'll face.

The students, Kelly said, are “really pretty effective so far. Whether or not that translates into real and meaningful legislation, we’re going to have to see.”

“The big question is: Can they keep this kind of pressure up for an extended period of time? It’s one thing to capture the attention of a country,” he said.  “It’s a whole other complicated process to not only capture the attention of members of Congress, but to get them to act in a responsible way.”

Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen and Eliza Collins