the NRA’s $35 million membership support program.
For its first big salvo, the NRA struck strategically: March 4, Oscar night. While the ceremony was underway, NRATV released a slick sixty-second video of spokeswoman Dana Loesch eviscerating “every Hollywood phony” and everything Hollywood stood for. She sat beside an hourglass in a black dress against a black background to deliver a scathing tirade against politicians, late-night hosts, athletes, and “every lying member of the media”—all the supposed puppet masters pulling the MFOL strings. It ended with Loesch appropriating the Me Too movement’s #TimesUp by saying, “Your time is running out; the clock starts now,” and flipping over the hourglass. NRATV tweeted the clip with the #TimesUp and #Oscars hashtags. It scored 4.4 million views that week.
Sarah Chadwick posted a parody response video the next day, one of MFOL’s first videos. It clocked 1.2 million views in the same week. They had some catching up to do, but the kids didn’t have $35 million or three dozen TV series with established audiences. Not bad for the first time out.
Meanwhile, they were expanding their website, with a new logo, new swag for sale, and a toolkit for kids around the country to use to start their own local marches. The sibling marches were gaining way more traction than they had ever dreamed.
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They were constantly trying out fresh tactics, but an underlying strategy was maintaining the megaphone. Weeks after the tragedy, David Hogg explained why he thought they had finally broken through. “The immediate choke hold that we placed on the news cycle, to make sure that people would not be able to look away from this,” he said. Five weeks to the march was always a risk, but they couldn’t take on another megaproject till they pulled off that one. They could use a little juice, though, and lots of other groups were sprouting up as well. Families of the fallen created Change the Ref, Meadow’s Movement, and Orange Ribbons for Jaime. Fellow students started Shine MSD, Parents Promise to Kids, Societal Reform Corporation, and others. Shine MSD was the most prominent, growing out of the anthemic song about the tragedy written by students Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña. They recorded the song and released it on iTunes, and it became a hit. And a huge momentum boost would come from the two National School Walkouts. They dovetailed perfectly with MFOL and they coordinated closely—to the point that much of the public assumed it was all a single effort—but mercifully, each walkout was organized and implemented by its own local team.
Before Valentine’s Day had ended, Lane Murdock had decided to convert her horror into action. She would stage a walkout. Murdock was a high school sophomore in Ridgefield, Connecticut, just twenty miles from Sandy Hook. She posted her idea as a Change petition before she went to bed that night. She had a powerful date in mind for her walkout: April 20, the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine that set this horrible wave in motion.
When MFOL announced its march on Washington that weekend, Murdock adapted her walkout into an all-day affair. The nonprofit group Indivisible helped Murdock’s petition take off. Soon it became a national movement.
But Murdock’s idea took a little while to gain national attention, and by then a different walkout had built a huge head of steam. The youth branch of the Women’s March, EMPOWER, announced their own plan two days after Valentine’s Day. It set its sights on March 14, the one-month anniversary of Parkland.
So there were the National School Walkouts in the works, organized independently, and benefiting from shared publicity.
But was it all accomplishing anything? How much were they affecting the gun debate? The Trace studied media coverage after the last seven major mass shootings. They all drove gun control into the conversation briefly, but peaked in the first two days, constituting around 2 percent of all news stories. Coverage then dropped off drastically, even after Orlando and Las Vegas. Parkland’s coverage actually rose after two days, peaking at 4 percent. It held near 2 percent for a solid month. Then one month out, something unprecedented in media would happen. The first National School Walkout would draw so much coverage, it would hit 5 percent of all news stories, eclipsing even the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Elise Jordan is a Republican political analyst and a Time magazine columnist. She has been participating in an ongoing series of focus groups around the country for the Ashcroft in America Research