Prologue
1
Gun country. Half the country. Fighting them, provoking them, alarming them, was doomed to failure, more failure, decades of failure—they had to try something new. They had to engage them. So Jackie Corin had come to North Carolina six weeks after escaping her high school, but she was scared. It was just one guy. One guy was all it took. “It was nerve-racking, because there was a guy staring me down and . . .” He was an older white guy with gray hair under an NRA cap. “An average-looking grandpa,” she said. “He just had a blank stare on his face the whole time, like I couldn’t tell if he was there to hear us out or he was coming to make some chaos.”
Jaclyn Corin, more comfortable as Jackie, is a petite blond teenager with fair skin, flowing hair, and a soprano voice that doesn’t carry in crowds. But she has a presence. After she spoke, Jackie left the podium but remained seated onstage, out in the open. Just like the kids at her high school who were no longer at her high school, because they had been in the open. “The people that went to the bathroom in the freshman building, they were easy targets,” she said. Jackie had just left the freshman hallway when that jerk started shooting. “It was all about timing. I literally walked out the doors that he walked into; it was like a span of fifteen minutes . . .” She didn’t complete the thought, but couldn’t stop picturing it.
Jackie’s new friend Sarah Chadwick spoke after her at the rally, and then local college kids energized by their visit took the stage. The scary guy’s eyes barely skimmed them, they just kept burrowing into her. “I felt like he was going to pop out a gun the whole time,” she said. Alert security? Say what to security? And there was hardly any security.
Just four days earlier, Jackie had spoken to hundreds of thousands filling Pennsylvania Avenue, plus huge banks of TV cameras, but the contrast only heightened her fear. “Obviously, the march on Washington was very well protected,” she said. “There was so much security, I was like, ‘OK, if something happens to me onstage, the whole world’s going to see it.’ But at this event, there weren’t really a lot of people there to react.”
The march on Washington had been covered as the culmination of their movement, but the kids had engineered it as a launchpad. Where they were headed was still hazy—they were making it up as they went along. But they had an instinct. Jackie had come to North Carolina as part of an intentional sharp right turn. She had arrived with two objectives: to rally the waves of young new supporters eager to join the movement, but also to engage Second Amendment warriors. Preaching to the converted was easy. The real slog, if they wanted to get serious, was to convince hunters, collectors, and enthusiasts that no one was coming for their guns. They would not convince them today, or this year. But eventually. It didn’t feel safe, though, and Jackie couldn’t wait to get out.
Jackie’s fear has since faded, but it lurks and swells unpredictably, in waves of silent terror that can knock her back at any moment. Fear was a constant stealth companion in the first strike she engineered in Tallahassee, the five-week sprint to the March for Our Lives (MFOL) in Washington, DC, and the grueling Road to Change bus tour, consolidating their network all summer along ten thousand miles of American highway. Fear was with her all the way to the midterms, which were their primary objective from that first weekend, when they concluded they would never break the logjam on gun legislation without changing some legislators. And putting the rest on notice.
It’s a particular sort of fear Jackie shares with survivors of Columbine and the Pulse nightclub shooting. Most mass shootings end within fifteen minutes, but Jackie and her friend Cameron Kasky were crouched in lockdown on the day of the shooting for three and a half hours. Throughout it, they got updates on the carnage by text and Twitter, as seventeen students and staff were murdered around them—long enough to ride the waves of panic, fear, and helplessness to settle on simmering rage. By the time Jackie and Cameron hit their beds that night, this movement was in motion.
It was speed that launched this movement, and a breadth of talent that packed its punch.