Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  That required a whole lot of bodies to be present when it mattered. Their goal was to amass a quarter of the student body, or 125 Peace Warriors at North Lawndale College Prep High School. They were at 120.

  The Peace Warriors taught him humility, D’Angelo said. Alex concurred. A way to redirect anger at the real adversary—which is complicated. Guns are killing his people, but they are the last link in a cycle: “the school-to-prison pipeline.” The first step to combating gang violence is getting honest about why kids join gangs, and then creating realistic alternatives. Gang life is alluring—let’s be straight about that, they said. Lawndale kids who take up arms are driven by economics. Crime pays; drugs pay. Gangbangers are decked out in some hot shit, all the tech gadgets and bling. But there are deeper emotional draws. The gang offers a sense of connection, an extended family, with a name that carries weight. Members feel confident and respected. In the short-run, they feel good. That’s a hell of a draw. It preys on kids feeling hopeless, disconnected, and bleak. Alex and D’Angelo had both felt the lure. When you’re humbled by violence, that’s when you’re most vulnerable to embracing it.

  The Peace Warriors have to match what the gangs offer at every level, and come through with it, legit, D’Angelo said. “If you’re looking for employment, we have it. If you’re looking for a sense of family, we have that.” When a kid is tottering on the gang bubble, you have to reach him on his terms, spoken and unspoken, before you inspire him to join the bigger cause. Not every kid’s going to tell you that his home life is a shambles and he feels like shit. But few kids grow up in that environment feeling good. The Peace Warriors’ big agenda—rescuing their neighborhood by rescuing its high school kids, one at a time—appeals to a lot of students. But first they have to survive.

  The Parkland kids were amazed. Not surprised, exactly, but enlightened. This was new. But it wasn’t that hard to understand.

  It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violence getting there. At the bus stop, on their porch, walking out of church. It could happen anywhere, and it did.

  They played more games, took breaks, and chatted in small groups. D’Angelo was talking to Emma about suffering, and the power of converting pain into action. That sounded a lot like principle 4. D’Angelo reached into his pocket and drew out a collection of dog tags, each a different color, translucent and stamped with a different number, one to six. He found the blue one. It said principle #4, with a peace sign—that was it. OK—Emma had no idea what that meant. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached six principles of nonviolence, D’Angelo explained. The Parkland kids were embarking on number 4: “Suffering can educate and transform.” And MLK singled out a particular kind of suffering: “Unearned suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.”

  “Oh wow, can we do this all together?” Emma asked.

  The full group reconvened. “We taught them the principles, and they taught us about policy,” D’Angelo said.

  8

  Strategy

  1

  Jackie had gone to Tallahassee with an emotional appeal. “It didn’t really work,” she said a few weeks later. “Rick Scott did defy the NRA, so obviously it meant something, but it’s just like a Band-Aid on a wound,” she said. “It’s not going to do anything.”

  They had to counter with credible demands. For two weeks, they had been demanding gun reform, but what exactly? Some of them were short on specifics; others, like David, were deep in the weeds. They all had different ideas. No consistency—big problem. It was vital that they speak in one voice—or they risked not being heard.

  A subtler issue was also surfacing—tone. They were taking some withering abuse, and they knew better than to turn vicious in response, but where were the lines? Twenty-plus personalities were their strength, but they needed boundaries on aggression. It was awkward to start imposing rules on each other. The incoming attacks were all over the map.

  The Peace Warriors arrived at just the right moment. They helped shape the MFOL policy agenda and the tenor of their approach. They all kept talking: by email, phone, and text. The Parkland kids peppered the Peace Warriors with questions about the six principles, and then burrowed deeper on their own. The more they learned, the more they found it was like listening to themselves—a better, wiser version of the selves they were fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures.

  They were most influenced by principle number 3: “Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.” Gun violence is the enemy, legislators blocking solutions were a problem, and those legislators were adversaries, not enemies—and that was a clear distinction, not just a grammatical point. Even if they had been corrupted by NRA money, none of those people were evil, and none of them deserved to be treated as if they were.

  The Parkland kids loved the spirit of the principles and their practical implications even more. Politics in America had grown deeply polarized and personal, and that was benefitting no one. It sure as hell hadn’t led to sensible gun laws. Demonizing your adversaries just sealed off ears. Right about that time, David Hogg identified the hardest part of their fight: “People mishearing what we’re trying to say. Like, do we want an assault weapons ban? Yeah, we do, but, we don’t want to take the Second Amendment away. We want responsible owners to be able to own guns. A lot of people have said that we’re like Nazis trying to take their guns and stuff—we fucking aren’t. We’re kids that are trying to save lives, and put reasonable gun legislation in place, where if you’re a mentally unstable individual or somebody with a criminal history, you can’t get a gun. And if you’re a criminal, we’re gonna come after your guns. I think we all can agree on that. But it’s these fringe arguments that so many of these people push that become the issue.”

  David Hogg struggled with principle number 3 more than anyone on the team. He was a born debater, with a short fuse. He slipped past the boundaries frequently, but it helped to have a team drawing him back.

  Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all. America was listening, eager to do something, supposedly, and turning to these teenagers to be led.

  About a week after the powwow at Emma’s, Father Pfleger flew the Parkland kids up north for more meetings, adding a group of young Latino activists from the gritty Brighton Park neighborhood, and white kids from the North Side. “We kind of put together this black, white, brown, West Side, South Side, North Side group,” Father Pfleger said. “They’re very different, you know. The Parkland kids are afraid in school; our kids are afraid to go to and from school.” They all spent the day together, and walked the neighborhood, to get a sense of where they lived and how they lived. That sparked much deeper conversations than they’d had at Emma’s house—about how they felt about those conditions, and what they had done to try and change them. The Parkland kids loved that: fresh perspectives and fresh inspiration. They were a few weeks into this struggle—the Chicago kids had been born into it.

  Chicago is battling a gun violence epidemic, but it’s generally seen by outsiders—even in affluent areas of Chicagoland—as a South Side problem. The Peace Warriors lived on the West Side. So did the Latino kids from Brighton Park. Each neighborhood was unique, with varying cultures and systemic hurdles. Individualized projects work best, but organizers are much more effective working together. The Parkland powwows actually helped solidify local ties. “We’ve had several meetings trying to build this coalition here in Chicago,” Father Pfleger would say a few months later. But the real goal was a unified coalition across the country, especially one uniting cities and suburbs. “S
o it’s not just Chicago doing their thing, Parkland doing their thing,” Father Pfleger said. “How do we begin to connect these dots and unite the youth around America?”

  The biggest hurdle was getting white America to reengage with the inner cities and try to help them out. It wasn’t a lack of caring; more a lack of hope. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and most of my family is there. I return regularly, and I rarely encounter people who are OK with the devastation going on nearby. Just as rare, though, are people doing anything significant to help. The problem seems too overwhelming and too intractable. We don’t really understand what’s going on there, or see any way out. So mostly, we turn away.

  The Parkland kids copped to the same ignorance before they were attacked. They had no clue what the kids in Chicago, Baltimore, or Compton were going through, or how to help them. But they were astonished how easy it was to learn. Two days together, a trip to one of their neighborhoods, and a lot of follow-up texts, and they had a pretty solid foundation. It wasn’t that hard.

  They also found it refreshing to see what an impact the Peace Warriors and the BRAVE kids were having on their neighborhoods and their schools. Some projects were failing miserably, others having tremendous success. But even the successful ones had one tragic element in common: virtually no financial support. America saw all these places as gaping holes of hopelessness and despair. Even locally, few suburbanites had ever heard of the Peace Warriors or any of the successful groups. Fund-raising was nearly impossible, because media coverage was nonexistent. So promising projects remained small and lacked basic resources—which hampered their ability to prove themselves sufficiently to draw more funding or exposure. A vicious cycle.

  Could the MFOL kids change that? They had a megaphone. They were eager to share it, but what if they could do better? Could they merge their movement with this huge existing urban network? It might be invisible to white America, but these folks had infrastructure, proven methods, voters, and a just cause.

  Despite all the work they did with groups like BRAVE and the Peace Warriors, MFOL still took a lot of flack in some circles for being a bunch of white kids. This criticism was most painful when it came from other Douglas students. At first, it had felt like the group had the diversity issue covered. MFOL was male, female, straight, gay, and bi, and had lots of Latinos. They were not trying to exclude anybody, they were just working with the kids they knew. There were plenty of other Douglas groups representing other demographics. Did they have to check all the boxes? Yes, came the reply from some quarters. Lots of other groups were active, but MFOL was sucking up 99 percent of the attention. And the bulk of donations. If they were going to speak for not just this school, but this generation—especially if they were going to represent the urban black struggle—they had to be more inclusive within their ranks.

  2

  Time for demands. Solutions had to be specific, and far reaching, but reasonable. Above all, they pledged to keep their hands off the Second Amendment. They didn’t want to cause trouble for hunters, gun collectors, or gun enthusiasts—although they didn’t think hunters had the right to a howitzer or an M16.

  Matt Deitsch, one of the recent grads, led the research project. The kids had returned to school, but he was going to withdraw from his college semester. He plowed through reams of studies and articles to create a syllabus, and then circulated the best material among the group. They read, discussed, argued, went back to do more research, and finally settled.

  They quickly developed five demands—and they called them that—(1) universal, comprehensive background checks; (2) a digitized, searchable database for the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives); (3) funding for the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence; (4) a ban on high-capacity magazines; (5) a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles. Not one of them was specific to mass shooters or schools.

  Professor Robert Spitzer weighed in on their agenda. Spitzer is an expert on gun politics. He is chairman of the political science department at the State University of New York College at Cortland and has written five books on gun policy and gun politics, and written about it for the New York Times. “I think it’s policy smart and it indicates a very shrewd eye to how they would like to proceed,” he said. That didn’t mean candidates could drop them right into their stump speeches. The movement actually requires two agendas, Spitzer said: one for policy and a variation to run on.

  “If I were running for office on the gun issue, I probably wouldn’t organize it around these particular items,” he said. Demands two and three were too boring and inside-baseball for voters presented as policy. But they could be powerful for a candidate and a movement that summarized them conceptually as plugging all the holes in a pathetically leaky system. And they could get much more mileage by driving home the message of why the background check system is so ineffective: it was deliberately undermined by the NRA. “I’m sure very few people are aware of the fact that the ATF still does its background checks from paper records located in a building in West Virginia,” Professor Spitzer said. “They were barred from computerizing their records back in the 1980s by pressure from the NRA written into legislation. When I repeat that now, reporters are kind of shocked, asking, ‘Is that really true? How could that be true? No computers?’”

  Voters don’t understand this, Spitzer said. They will be outraged once someone demonstrates that effectively.

  The same concept applies to demand three, Spitzer said, though its potential is somewhat less explosive. It’s hard to find people against studying an issue. Of course most voters would support study, and be disgusted to learn that was forbidden—though it won’t bring them out to the polls. It’s vital that it be written into legislation, though, so that as the movement succeeds in passing legislation, the system can be studied as it evolves. Various changes will prove more and less effective than anticipated. The ability to study what we’re doing will be critical for long-term success. That’s pretty obvious—unless your goal is undermining that success.

  The sticky item on that list was banning semiautomatic rifles, Spitzer said. “It’s a pretty hot gun issue to touch. There is support for it, candidates have campaigned on it, including some former military candidates. But . . .” That one really depended on the district, he said. You could run on it in urban areas, but it would be tricky in a lot of swing districts. Candidates really have to read their district on that one. There was movement on semiautomatics, though, Spitzer said, even before Parkland. “Right now there actually is majority support for restricting or banning assault weapons and that was not the case ten years ago. That’s kind of a marker of the outer edge of policy ideas that can win majority support.”

  Background checks were the no-brainer, Spitzer said. “It’s low-hanging fruit. Ninety percent of Americans consistently support uniform background checks, as do eighty percent of gun owners. So it’s practically universal support. It’s hard to get ninety percent support for anything in America.”

  Spitzer had a few suggestions for candidates beyond the MFOL demands. “I would talk about a terrorist watch list. I would talk about doing a better job of getting information about people who have mental illnesses, because that’s been a big problem. And that’s also something that everybody agrees on, and it’s something you can explain. And that would be plenty. I think those three things alone would be plenty in a campaign.”

  MFOL had an agenda now, and was sizing up its adversary. The NRA closely guards its membership data, but it claims nearly five million members—“And David Hogg is three of them,” Jackie took to telling audiences later. “Lots of people like to buy us memberships.” They doubted the five million figure, but if accurate, it represents just 1.5 percent of the population. Yet the NRA has succeeded by turning out reliable single-issue voters to swing close elections, with no countervailing force. Sizable majorities favor gun reform, but progressives never vote on guns. That asymmetry allows a tiny minority to consistently defeat huge majorities, or
to convince politicians they will. The NRA’s aura of invincibility goes largely untested, because officials so rarely risk opposing it, even on trivial matters. Every “wrong” vote, even for legislation backed by solid majorities of gun owners, chips away at a legislator’s NRA score, which can energize a primary opponent.

  MFOL had to be that countervailing force. They had to demonstrate they could match the NRA vote for vote. Optimally, exceed it. They set their sights on November, to prove to an audience of 435 that it’s riskier to oppose them than the NRA. They saw the number one battleground as the House of Representatives. They had to overturn some seats.

  3

  Most of the MFOL kids were too young to vote. They couldn’t even check into a hotel room, and a parent or two had to chaperone them on every trip. There were a lot of trips. Jackie Corin estimated she had logged thirty thousand miles or more that spring, meeting with school groups, legislators, academics, and activists, traveling as far as a conference in Kenya. She wasn’t even the most frequent flier—that would be David, though a dozen of them were practically living on the road. They were soaking up so much out there: organizing techniques, messaging, what was working, what was falling flat, what kids out in the trenches really needed, and how their tweets were rippling out into local communities in unforeseen ways, good and bad. Time to change the fear dynamic. All that local contact crystallized their phase two strategy long before the march: Leverage all that enthusiasm. Organize it.