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 her 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