Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  That’s really the whole ball game. Thirty Parkland kids cannot turn 435 House races around—or influence thousands of races on local ballots. One night in Naperville, Bismarck, or San Antonio won’t even jump-start a struggling campaign. But it can fire up a movement.

  “Teenagers are sometimes nervous to make friends and stuff,” Jackie said. “So creating a network of kids and organizations that can help each other without us being the mediators is so important. Because we’re not superheroes. This Road to Change is connecting people along the way—so they can work together in the future.”

  The Parkland, Chicago, and Naperville kids all talked about that afterward, Jackie said. “And they were like, ‘We definitely want to work with them in the future.’ And we all went to dinner afterwards together, so we definitely connected.”

  4

  The Parkland kids had either helped amp up interest in the midterms, or picked the right year to engage with voters. A Pew Research Center survey that summer found 51 percent of voters—and 55 percent of voters supporting Democrats—enthusiastic about the midterms. Those are the highest numbers ever recorded since it began asking twenty-one years ago, and double digits above five of the last six midterms at the same point.

  By summer, signs had been accumulating that gun control was finally becoming a viable issue on the Left. The established wisdom has always been that Democrats don’t vote on guns. Neither do most Republicans. But a small subset does—sometimes enough to sway a primary. This asymmetry allows a tiny minority to consistently defeat huge majorities, or to convince politicians they will.

  In late spring and early summer, national polls identified gun legislation as the third or fourth priority for voters heading into the midterms—after the economy and health care, but ahead of immigration and taxes. That’s up from rarely making the list in recent years. CNN’s polling unit regularly asked voters to rate issues in importance on their next vote for Congress. Gun policy had soared to 49 percent “extremely important” and 30 percent “very important” a week after Parkland—numbers some predicted would fall just as fast as they had risen. But their next poll in May had “extremely” important ticking down just four points—still more than double the figure from 2002—and “very important” rising one.

  But would these trends translate to votes? In late July, TargetSmart released an analysis of Parkland’s impact on voter registration. Six battleground states showed an increase of 8 to 16 percent among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine. The numbers are actually better than they look at first blush. The Miami Herald did a great analysis of the Florida numbers, in much more detail. In Florida, young voters added 7 percent new registrations in 2.5 months. This may sound modest, but that’s 7 percent of people choosing to register for the first time in their lives. A better comparison is looking at comparable time frames. For all Florida voters, fewer people registered in the 2.5 months immediately after Parkland than before. But in the under-twenty-nine group, registration surged by an unprecedented 41 percent.

  5

  Cameron had a personal message for the group’s skeptics out in gun country. “I have guns in my home,” he told one audience. “My friend David does as well.” Both their dads work in law enforcement, and the guns are stored responsibly in their homes, he said. “I don’t know where the key is. I don’t want to know where the key is. Our house practices responsible gun ownership. I was at a gun range when I was eight. We are trying to promote laws and changes that make gun ownership in this country more responsible.”

  On the bus tour, they typically wrapped up around nine p.m., followed by selfies, one-on-one connections with audience members, and dinners with local organizers. By the time the kids staggered back to their hotel rooms it was usually midnight. Then they’d wake up around dawn, drive four to eight hours, and repeat.

  It was a massive logistical undertaking. And a tough slog. Halfway through, in Denver, the Parkland kids were still in good spirits, but the grueling schedule was wearing them down. “You eat unhealthy food and you don’t sleep properly and your body’s just always confused,” Jackie said.

  “Your body, it’s not made to sleep on a bus,” Alfonso said. “So like I’ll go to sleep, I’ll wake up in two hours, my body will be completely destroyed, right? I’ll drink some water, chew some gum, and it’s just the same thing for so, so long.” He described bus life as a big crew crammed into a small apartment. “We’re twenty-two people in total on the bus and we have about like twenty square feet of up and down and it’s basically split up. There’s a little section where most of the adults stay to do their work, and then there’s just the strip with like beds, the front where the tables are.” Some of the kids would always be working at the tables, Jackie for sure.

  Jackie said she was unable to sleep on the bus, so she tried to get work cranked out. Her big challenge was the logistics. She had taken the lead on organizing all the events. Whatever cornfields or mountains were rolling by her bus window, Jackie’s head and phone were several days and thousands of miles ahead, arranging venues, permits, publicity, and speakers. She coordinated with local chapters to handle a thousand tiny details, like T-shirt sales and check-in wristbands, and of course all those kids with clipboards registering young new voters.

  “Every morning I wake up to anywhere between twenty and one hundred texts,” Jackie said in late July, as she geared up for the tour’s final leg. She typically worked with three to four lead organizers in each city, and juggled several states at a time.

  Many of the connections are with adults as well, and meeting the diminutive seventeen-year-old behind the tour sometimes took them by surprise. Paula Reed, the Columbine teacher who’d met with the other Parkland group in April, was again asked to speak when the bus tour came to Denver. Later, Reed posted this on Facebook: “When I got out of my car and met Jaclyn, I thought she had to be a different Jaclyn than the one I’d been in contact with about the event. I just didn’t picture someone so young.”

  The MFOL team scoured each city for promising young leaders. Every few stops, they coax one or more on board. They arrived in Denver with four kids they had picked up in Houston, one from Milwaukee, and three from Chicago, plus one from Harlem they had connected with earlier. They are cultivating a cadre of young leaders and giving them crash courses in public speaking and other skills. For the first time, MFOL expanded beyond Douglas students and recent graduates on the bus tour, widening out to a national network, with many of these new recruits full members of the national team.

  MFOL prides itself on being nimble, and by midsummer the Florida tour was rechristened the “Southern Tour” and expanded to include Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Based on RSVPs over the course of the summer, the group would estimate it met fifty thousand people. The events tended to be well organized, if not always well promoted. They relied on their local contacts to reach local media and local networks. Some kids were great at that, with big networks to plug into. Others clearly had no idea. Most events were sellouts, often standing-room only, but some houses were half-full. Media and promotion was clearly the organization’s weak link.

  6

  A gun group decided to follow them for four days across Texas. It staged small counterprotests at every stop “with guns bigger than they were,” as one of the kids mentioned. When they pulled into Denver a few days later, some of the kids were shaken up. “People had like two ARs, two pistols, two handguns strapped on their belt, and a knife,” Jackie said. “Are you trying to prove a point? Because you look dumb.” She was a bit rattled, but not deterred.

  And as they were leaving Texas, another group in Utah announced it would follow the kids’ bus there with a military-style vehicle, topped with a replica machine gun. The Salt Lake City movie theater scheduled to host their event promptly disinvited them, citing fear of violence. Jackie had three days to salvage the event as they pulled into Denver, a challenging stop. In addition to the town hall and a barbeque there, she had organized a meeting between h
er group and two dozen survivors of Columbine, Aurora, and a host of other mass shootings. “We are getting a new venue! No worries!” Jackie tweeted the same day the theater canceled. “A lot of venues reached out to us in the area because they felt bad,” she said. “The other venue just canceled because they were scared for security reasons. We’re targets.”

  It was generally Matt and David who peeled off from the group to engage with the counterprotestors. David may have seemed like the most inflammatory choice, but he was really good at de-escalating when he wanted to, and in person, he generally wanted to. Cameron told a town hall about David getting accosted at a Publix supermarket, someone “spewing hate into his face,” and David calmly talked him down.

  The gun-toters’ effect on the kids varied. Some said it didn’t bother them at all—and it didn’t seem to. Just more people trying to intimidate them. No real danger. But others, grappling with trauma issues that weren’t going away, were having a rough time in these situations. Symptoms of trauma and depression are not always overt. No one knows when you’re fighting to get out of bed every day, or quietly breaking down in your room. Parents, siblings, and close friends are often taken by surprise.

  The kids also made a conscious decision to route their tour through the sites of several tragic shootings—including Newtown, Aurora, Ferguson, and Columbine. The survivors taught them a great deal about recovery, coping with the spotlight, and the stages of trauma ahead. And they got a crash course on an entire generation of survivors struggling to find a way out of this blight: tactics that have succeeded, as well as others that had seemed promising but fell flat.

  Tom Mauser, perhaps the godfather of their movement, appeared with them at the Denver town hall. Tom was the only parent or spouse of the thirteen murdered at Columbine to take on gun safety aggressively in 1999. He soldiered on alone, later joined by hundreds affected by subsequent tragedies—and in nineteen years, he’s learned a thing or two. Though most of the crowd came out to see the Parkland kids, it was Tom Mauser’s name on so many lips as the audience drifted out.

  Mauser had lamented that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had gotten three of their four guns through the so-called gun show loophole. For a year, legislators failed to close that loophole, even in Colorado in the wake of the tragedy. Finally Mauser helped lead an effort to put it on the state ballot. It passed by 40 points. “If you put something reasonable in front of people, they will support it,” he said.

  He also cautioned that the NRA had been winning with a narrative suggesting that cities like Chicago with the most restrictive gun laws suffer the worst gun violence. But most of Chicago’s guns came from Indiana. “It’s a lie!” he shouted. “But the NRA narrative is believed by a lot of people. You have to change that.”

  The most powerful moments on the tour were often unforeseen. One night in Denver, Paula Reed, who had also taught Tom Mauser’s son, Daniel, appeared with him, and she repeated her story about the horror of being asked to shoot Dylan. What she didn’t realize was that Dylan’s mother, Sue Klebold, was seated in the front row, facing her, barely ten feet away. Sue stopped taking notes and set her notepad down. She appears so rarely in public that even in that crowd, she had gone unnoticed. Sue had come to support the MFOL kids, who had asked to meet her for dinner afterward. She and the Parkland kids chose to keep the conversation private, but each raved about the other. “I’m smitten by those kids,” Sue emailed me the next morning.

  20

  Homeward Bound

  1

  The bus tour was a time of reckoning. Exhausting, monotonous, and mind-numbingly repetitive. It mirrored the strains that tear apart so many touring bands: same faces, in the same small space, repeating the same greatest hits every night. They had been honing their best lines and best anecdotes for six months. So sick of their own words. The cities, the stages, and the faces staring back changed, but blurred together too quickly to make an impression.

  But for some, it was also invigorating. Like troubadours, they were drawn to it. “You just picked up a hitcher / A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway,” Joni Mitchell once sang.

  The timing was also consequential: six months into this new relationship with their new selves. If the first four seemed breakneck, it was nothing compared with this. And as they gazed ahead to the last stops, a new version of their old lives awaited them. The younger contingent would arrive back in Parkland on Monday, have a single day off; then on Wednesday morning, they’d start their senior, junior, or sophomore years. And for others like Emma, it was a bigger change. First day of college, first day of adulthood—which they had been thrust into prematurely on Valentine’s Day.

  And so, as the tour wound down, everyone was reevaluating. Some would be moving on with their lives. Others would be collecting themselves for even bigger roles.

  2

  Jackie landed in the reinvigorated camp. On February 13, the day before her world changed, her plan had been to graduate in the top 1 percent of her class and then pursue a nursing career. “I was on the road to getting straight A’s this year, and I was going to, but I was on a trip for the Time One Hundred gala, and I couldn’t take my math final,” she said. For the first time, Jackie had to choose between academics and activism.

  Even after she skipped the final, her precalc scores were high enough to give her a B plus, her second ever. “I was top one percent of my class, but now I’ll be like top fifteen percent. That’s fine,” she said. “It messed up everyone. Everyone in the group is smart, and all of our GPAs dropped, because we just didn’t have time.”

  Her fall schedule was dramatically different too. They turned in course cards the week before Valentine’s Day, and Jackie had four AP classes scheduled for senior year. She ultimately pared it back to just one. “Honestly, the end of this year was so hard for me—not only because of the emotions, but also because I always had work to do,” she said. “And I didn’t feel the need or want to force interest in precalculus. I’ll look at the board in my English classroom and be like, ‘This isn’t helping me.’” She kept one AP course, government, “because it’s probably what’s going to intrigue me,” she said.

  A week after Tallahassee, she was starting to consider a career in politics—a prospect she found startling but also electrifying. Then she spent months mucking around with politicians. She was not impressed. “I don’t really know what I want to do, but I feel like I don’t want to be a politician when I’m older,” she had concluded by June. “Politics is always going to be dirty. And I don’t want to be around that environment.”

  She envisioned a nonprofit role helping improve kids’ lives. She planned to keep up the gun fight for a while, but not forever. “I feel like I work well with kids,” she said. “I quit my camp-counselor job this summer to do Road to Change, but it breaks my heart because I’m not with my girls.”

  One thing is certain: uncertainty. “Before all this, I was always the person who had my future set and planned. And now there’s nothing about my life that’s set and planned. So it’s a very different way of living, but the discomfort is kind of . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know the word for it. I’ve been getting adjusted to the discomfort, actually—that’s a better way to put it. Because before I was always comfortable, and this discomfort is new, yet welcome.”

  David had gone in the opposite direction. He had a seven-year plan laid out, culminating in 2025, when he turns twenty-five, and will be eligible to serve in the House of Representatives. Yes, politics would be dirty—so who better to wield the spade? David was leaning into his gap year, to hurl all his energy into the midterms, an arrangement he hoped to repeat in 2020, helping to elect a worthy new president. Before and after, he would go to college, starting in the fall of 2019, and “read a shitload of books.” That would give him plenty of time to prep for that first congressional run.

  Ryan Deitsch and Delaney Tarr also ended up deferring college for at least a semester to throw everything they had into the midterms. />
  Matt Deitsch continued to defer his college career to keep working at MFOL full-time.

  Lauren Hogg and Daniel Duff were sophomores now, eager to stick with MFOL and excited to start taking on more responsibility. After six months interacting with the media, Daniel was thinking about joining us. He had a few years to pick a college major, but was starting to lean toward journalism. “I’m spending a lot of my time with like film and TV production and all that,” he said. “But I’m also very interested in creative writing and journalism, and they kind of go hand in hand.”

  A temporary casualty of the MFOL success was the Douglas drama program. “It decimated the drama program,” Alfonso said. He chose not to go out for the fall play; so did Cameron and most of the others from MFOL. Too much at stake. Cameron didn’t even return to Douglas. Broward County had an online course program for homeschooling, and Cameron enrolled in that to finish his high school education. He would spend most of the fall in Los Angeles. Alfonso also enrolled in most of his courses online, heading over to school just for drama class. He skipped the play but kept the class.

  Several of the Chicago kids went on to college. Alex King headed to Grand Valley State University. He was majoring in theater, a happy coincidence after six months with the Parkland drama kids. “My mind was set on it long before I met any of them,” he said. Alex was the first in his family to make it out of the neighborhood and into university. Realizing the dream.

  When the movement was just beginning, and its future uncharted, Jackie foresaw a generation of struggle, to make the world safe for the kids she would raise someday. Five months later, with thousands of miles in the rearview, she confirmed that assessment. “Though election cycles can change things, it’ll take a generation of people to understand that they don’t need these weapons,” she said. She met a lot of people in gun country, and heard a lot of them say, “I’m a responsible gun owner; I didn’t do anything wrong.” She understands that. But her generation, trained to expect a gunman to burst into their classroom any day, tends to see it differently.