Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,40

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.

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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