Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  The anti-gun movement added a number of passionate young activists to its ranks in 2018, following the Parkland tragedy, in which an unhinged former student named Nikolas Cruz shot and killed seventeen students and staff members at the school. Among the survivors, three students—David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, and Emma González—quickly emerged as spokespersons. All three were well-spoken and telegenic. Kasky, a baby-faced seventeen-year-old self-described “theater kid,” debated Florida senator Marco Rubio at a CNN town hall event a week after the shooting; the teen effortlessly eviscerated the senator, who tripped over himself trying to explain why he couldn’t just stop taking money from a pro-gun lobbyist group, the National Rifle Association.

  Hogg, a high school correspondent for the Sun-Sentinel newspaper with an interest in video journalism, was particularly well prepared to become the face of teen anti-gun activism. Tall and handsome, he delivers speeches at rallies as if he’s been doing it for years. Though neither Hogg nor his allies responded to a request for comment, I did meet him briefly at a party in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2018. Off camera, he was stoic and a bit out of sorts, though it couldn’t have been easy being the only person at the event who wasn’t old enough to drink.

  González, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and president of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s gay-straight alliance at the time of the massacre, comes across as the most radical of the group—perhaps by accident. Her chosen hairstyle is a buzz cut, but not because she’s trying to make a statement.

  “People asked me, ‘Are you taking a feminist stand?’ No, I wasn’t,” she told the Sun-Sentinel. “It’s Florida. Hair is just an extra sweater I’m forced to wear.”8

  Nevertheless, Jorge Duany, a professor of anthropology at Florida International University, told the Washington Post that González’s “queerness connects her both to a U.S. politics of social justice and to Cuban and Cuban American struggles for queer rights. She is part of a generation that feels freer about claiming identities and loyalties.”9

  That’s something we’ve seen explicitly with young progressive activists: an appeal to overlapping identities, in keeping with the tenets of intersectionality. Even so, post-Parkland anti-gun activism—the youngest movement I’ve studied for this book—seems reasonably focused on its single issue and has thus far avoided some of the problems that have plagued other Zillennial activists. To their credit, the March for Our Lives organizers have remained laser-focused on chipping away at gun rights, and have expressed a willingness to work with anyone on the left, on the right, or in the center who shares their goals. They do not, for instance, blame everything on capitalism. (Of course, there’s still time—Kasky, Hogg, and González have yet to take a course in critical theory.)

  While intersectionality has not warped the priorities of the anti-gun movement, the other staple of Zillennial activism—safety culture—is omnipresent. The survivors of mass shootings, of course, have better reason than most to be feeling unsafe, to be extra sensitive to safety concerns, and to ask what reasonable steps could be taken or what new policies implemented to reduce the likelihood of mass shootings.

  Mass shootings, though, are not particularly common events. As we discussed in the introduction, overall gun violence has declined precipitously since the early 1990s, and school shootings are no exception. According to James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, shootings in schools are no more common than they used to be—indeed, they are less common.10 Fox’s research describes school shootings as “incredibly rare events.” The data simply do not support the contention that school shootings have reached epidemic proportions.

  This would come as news to the kids at the March for Our Lives rally, who spoke as if the fate of every kid in America would be to perish in a mass shooting until and unless the Second Amendment is repealed. And it wasn’t just rally participants—organizers humored this narrative. The March for Our Lives website contends, “Our schools are unsafe. Our children and teachers are dying.… Every kid in this country now goes to school wondering if this day might be their last. We live in fear.”

  This level of fear just isn’t validated by the data. Death by accident—car crash, drowning, choking—is significantly more likely than death by mass shooting.11 Even among gun deaths, tragedies such as Parkland and Newtown are a departure from the norm: most gun deaths are suicides, one-off homicides, or accidents, and they typically involve handguns, which kill far more people each year than assault rifles.12

  One can still think gun control is an important public policy for combating overall violence—fewer guns would probably mean fewer suicides, for instance.13 But the bottom line is that mass-casualty school shootings are already so rare, it would be fairly difficult to craft a public policy that would further reduce them.

  Why, then, is the culture of fear surrounding mass shootings—and school shootings, specifically—so pervasive? To answer that question, we need to wind the clock back two decades, to April 20, 1999. I would argue that this single day was a huge contributor to the rise of safe-space culture in American schools. It is at least as important as September 11, 2001, in terms of understanding the psychological factors and explicit government policies that undergird Zillennial safety needs.

  April 20, 1999, was the day two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered thirteen of their classmates and teachers—and wounded two dozen others—in what became known as the Columbine massacre. The tragedy, the deadliest high school shooting in history up to that point in time, created mass panic about violence in schools. In response, policymakers codified a new regime of permanent coddling in American education aimed at addressing the root causes of Columbine. Unfortunately, most people vastly misunderstood the why of Harris and Klebold, and the policies that kicked into high gear in Columbine’s wake—anti-bullying initiatives, zero-tolerance discipline, and school resource officers—reenvisioned school as a place where kids would feel protected from all dangers, physical and emotional. If the “safe space” is a symbol of modern American education gone wrong, Columbine and its aftermath played a surprising, subtle role in getting us there.

  News coverage in the wake of Columbine fixated on bullying as the easiest explanation for the actions of the killers. A typical news story in the Washington Post decried Columbine’s “cult of the athlete” and its penchant for turning a blind eye to jocks tormenting social outcasts like Harris and Klebold.14 “The sports trophies were showcased in the front hall—the artwork, down a back corridor,” the Post lamented, as if the likelihood of this arrangement producing a mass shooting was obvious in hindsight.

  Bullying was bad at Columbine, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that the killers were pushed past some breaking point. On the contrary, there’s good evidence that Harris, in particular, was a sociopath bent on doing something truly evil, independent of the circumstances at his school.

  Writer Dave Cullen’s 2009 book, Columbine, shattered many of the myths associated with the attack. Harris and Klebold, Cullen writes, were themselves bullies—a fact that better reflects the reality of the high school experience, where alliances and enmities between various students shift more frequently than on an episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County. Nor did they specifically target their tormentors during the attack: while some of the people they shot were athletes, none of these victims had been known to go after Harris and Klebold. Harris, according to Cullen, was the real mastermind. (Klebold, a more traditionally troubled kid, probably would not have pulled it off on his own.) Harris was driven not by revenge or even hatred but by his contempt for those he deemed inferior, including “people who say that wrestling is real,” “people who use the same word over and over again,” and “Star Wars fans.” “GET A FRIGGIN LIFE YOU BORING GEEEEEEKS!” he wrote on his website.

  “These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore,” wrote Cullen in Slate. “These are the rantings of someone with a
messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority.”15

  Other popular motivating factors—violent videogames, Marilyn Manson’s music, the “trench coat mafia,” and America’s violent gun culture (the preferred explanation of Michael Moore’s documentary film Bowling for Columbine)—have been similarly debunked.

  “All these theories had one theme in common: that the perpetrators were actually victims,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks in 2004. “In retrospect, it’s striking how avidly we clung to this perpetrator-as-victim narrative.”16

  The panic that followed bears a lot of similarities to the panic over kidnappings and stranger danger (detailed in the introduction) that helped codify policies discouraging children from being independent. To stop bullying—and the violence that would surely result from it—schools needed to adopt zero-tolerance policies aimed at weeding out problematic kids. Bringing a weapon to school, talking about weapons, playing with objects that weren’t weapons but looked like weapons: all of these were verboten. Such policies became more and more ridiculous over the years, until in 2013, a seven-year-old boy from Maryland was suspended for chewing his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.17 More recently, in March 2017, a five-year-old girl, Caitlin, was suspended for holding a stick that looked like a gun while playing make-believe during recess.18 (She was pretending to be a royal guard.) A spokesperson for Hoke County Schools defended the decision to suspend Caitlin on the ground that she “posed a threat to other students when she made a shooting motion” with the stick. There was even a fourth-grader from Odessa, Texas, who was suspended for “making a terroristic threat” against another student: the boy claimed his magic ring could make a classmate disappear like Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings movies.19

  Again, school violence was decreasing before Columbine, and continued to decrease after. But media obsession with school shootings captured the public’s overactive imagination, and a spate of bad policies followed. Zero-tolerance policies were just the tip of the iceberg. Consider this: Before 1975, there were virtually zero cops in schools. But a nationwide spike in crime—the crime rate rose a whopping 80 percent between 1975 and 1989—changed that. While policymakers confronted real violence in the streets, they came to fixate on schools as places where firmer policing was required. Schools began to hire school resource officers (SROs) to patrol the hallways and take on an increased role in meting out discipline to wayward students. By 1997, about 20 percent of public schools employed some kind of cop.

  Beginning in 1999 (the same year, one notes, as the Columbine shootings), the federal government stepped in. The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) started doling out millions of dollars to school districts for the purpose of hiring SROs. Between 1999 and 2006, some three thousand school districts took advantage of $753 million in federal funds, hiring cops left and right. In 2010, that same office initiated the COPS Hiring Program, which gave a whopping $1 billion to local municipalities over the years for the purposes of hiring and retaining police officers. School resource officers were the second-most-common beneficiaries of this funding. The COPS office claims that its grants have made it possible for schools to hire some seven thousand police officers over the last twenty years. It is now the case that 43 percent of public schools, including two-thirds of middle schools and high schools, employ a police officer.

  I can think of no better way to convince an entire generation that the world is unsafe and that students are especially vulnerable than to install police officers in every elementary school, expel or arrest anyone who engages in deviant behavior, and incessantly engage in fearmongering about mass shootings.

  We expect young people to value freedom, autonomy, and individuality, and we’re frustrated that so many college students want administrators to make them feel safe from offensive ideas and hurtful words—to stamp out dissent and punish imperfection. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that young people feel this way: after all, their formative years were spent in educational institutions that have become undeniably more carceral—where people who provoke the authorities, test the boundaries of acceptable behavior, or say or do inappropriate things are weeded out. It’s no wonder they recoil in horror at the kind of absolute freedom that can be found (ideally) in college: they have been taught that school is a dangerous place, but the authorities are there to make everybody feel safe and comfortable.

  Given the role media and government have played in fostering safe-space culture, it’s brutally unfair to blame the kids themselves for craving comfort. If Zillennials suffer from learned helplessness, it’s really the previous generation’s fault. And yet the Parkland survivors are routinely pilloried by conservative media. Hogg and González have been victims of vicious conspiracies; a fake photo purporting to show González shredding a copy of the Constitution spread like wildfire among right-wing Twitter users. When Hogg complained publicly about being rejected by UCLA, conservatives mocked him relentlessly. He was also “swatted” by an unknown prankster; “swatting” is a new phenomenon that involves filing a false police report claiming there is a dangerous armed person at a specific address. The SWAT team then shows up to the address, prepared for a hostage situation. The odious practice has already cost innocent people their lives. (Neither Hogg nor his family was at home when the SWAT team arrived, thankfully.)

  Instead of heading to college in 2018, Hogg decided to take a year off from school to focus on political outreach in the run-up to the midterm elections. March for Our Lives is now primarily concerned with registering young people to vote in hopes of gaining more support for national gun control measures. According to its website, “Now is the time for the youth vote to stand up to the gun lobby when no one else will.” In the past, the anti-gun movement has had difficulty keeping its momentum going—the American public loses interest in the issue as the most recent tragedy fades from memory. We have yet to see whether this time will be any different.

  Born in the TPUSA

  “The left hates the idea that there are other ideas,” said Charlie Kirk, the fast-talking twenty-six-year-old founder and president of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an activist group for conservative students. “There’s a reason leftists ostracize others from campus. They don’t like to be around people who disagree with them. They are wildly intolerant.”

  Kirk is tall and dark of hair, and on this day he was dressed in a snappy navy blue suit. He was speaking from the stage at TPUSA’s July 2018 High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. The event featured quite a roster: attendees enjoyed speeches from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, House majority whip Steve Scalise, Fox News host Jesse Watters, podcaster Dave Rubin, and dozens of other right-of-center celebs. A few hundred conservative high school students sat in the audience—several wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. These are kids who profess to love capitalism—there was an “I ♥ Capitalism” banner on the stage—and especially love Trump, even though the two are often in deep conflict. (Just hours before Kirk appeared onstage, Trump had tweeted, “Tariffs are the greatest!”)

  Young people lean to the left, and so the attendees at the TPUSA event shared the bond of holding beliefs unpopular among their peer group. “How many of you lost friends for posting about politics?” asked Kirk. Virtually every single person in the audience raised a hand.

  I spoke with some of the teens in between sessions. Nearly all had been bullied by their classmates for holding conservative views, which was part of the reason they considered the left to be horridly intolerant. Many identified with Kyle Kashuv, a pro-gun Parkland survivor who has become a notable young conservative activist in the last year and who lost friends for coming out as a Second Amendment supporter in the wake of the massacre.

  “I had lost like 90 percent of all the friends I’ve had because of it,” Kashuv told me. “It shows that people just don’t have the ability to be friends with people who have disagreeing opinio
ns with them.”

  Kashuv’s pro-gun views might have made him a pariah in Parkland, but at TPUSA—where he now serves as director of high school outreach—he’s a celebrity. His appearances onstage—he introduced most of the speakers and participated in an “ask me anything” session—frequently drew wild cheers, and everybody wanted to get a picture with him.

  One attendee, a fifteen-year-old I’ll call Rachel, who struck up a conversation with me while I was searching for an outlet to charge my iPhone, described Kashuv as “looking like a snack.” I had no idea what that meant. It’s slang for someone who’s considered attractive, she explained.

  Rachel, echoing other students’ comments, told me people at her school turned against her when they found out she was a conservative. The summit was a welcome relief from that, and also a reminder that she wasn’t alone.

  “I think we just all realized this was a place we could be ourselves, because we are so used to not being ourselves,” she told me.

  Rachel had made plenty of new friends at the conference, including Sam, an exceedingly chatty sixteen-year-old who hoped to enter the military—just as soon as he finished educating me on every aspect of his conservative worldview. Indeed, this was the norm; while activists at leftist gatherings frequently greet me and other members of the press with skepticism and caution, these right-wing teenagers couldn’t wait to confess their unpopular opinions. I later found myself desperately trying to escape a conversation with another attendee who was hell-bent on convincing me that term limits were indefensible on conservative grounds, something I could not have had less interest in debating.

  Another teen, Amara, was a bit more reserved than her friends Rachel and Sam. She was also fifteen, and ethnically mixed: part Hispanic, part black, part white. She told me she wanted to be a journalist—before becoming president.