The Parkland Teens

From the moment David Hogg turned toward the news camera, shifting away from the reporter to address a nationwide audience that, after dozens of similar shootings, had run out of ways to respond to these events, it was clear the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would not follow any script. It was February 15, not yet a full day since 14 students and three adults had been killed by a classmate in Parkland, Florida, and Hogg declared that he would not let the political aftermath proceed on the gun lobby’s timetable or terms: “My message to lawmakers in Congress is, ‘Please take action.’”

With a raw and ferocious energy, the students of Parkland mixed grievance and grief into a nonstop social media counterattack on the politicians they believed had left them exposed to mortal danger for the sake of NRA donations. Heart-wrenching, mordantly funny and sometimes profane, they leveraged their status as victims to challenge major conservative figures, sometimes face-to-face, baiting them into ugly personal attacks on traumatized teens. They mimicked NRA talking points and beat rhetorical swords into tweet shares. They seemed both casually unscripted and also somehow rigorously prepared, and they moved with a speed that stunned the nation, forging an utterly novel response to a crisis that had long before ossified into a kabuki play of political posturing and inaction.

They did it by refusing to let the country turn its attention to other issues, seizing every platform offered to them and creating their own when what was offered wasn’t enough. Within four days of the shooting, Hogg and his fellow students—Jaclyn Corin, Emma González, Cameron Kasky and others—coalesced under a banner called Never Again. “We call B.S.,” González shouted into the mic at a rally in Fort Lauderdale, imbuing their nascent movement with teenage idealism and outrage. Less than a week later, Kasky stood on stage at a CNN town hall and confronted Senator Marco Rubio, not as a one-and-done questioner from the audience but virtually as an equal with control of the microphone and utterly conscious of his sway over the crowd. “Can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA?” he asked. Rubio’s answer, repeated three times, that the NRA supports his agenda rather than the other way around, earned catcalls from the crowd and pointed follow-up questions from Kasky. If the Parkland kids’ almost shocking lack of stage fright wasn’t already evident, it would be by the end of March, when they organized the March for Our Lives, which drew several hundred thousand people to Washington and spawned hundreds of simultaneous marches around the nation and the world.

They were drama kids, a few of them, so, not surprisingly, they were derided by NRA sympathizers as “crisis actors” in some false-flag set piece. The allegation didn’t seem to fluster them. While they support specific gun control measures, they cast their message as “gun violence prevention”—it’s not just about school shootings, they say now. Over the summer, as many as 21 students joined a 20-state bus tour of the country (dubbed “Road to Change”), and 12 traveled around Florida, registering voters in time for the midterm elections. Under other circumstances, they might have been at camp or working summer jobs, but as they have done ever since that fateful day in February, they chose to write a different script.

—Bill Duryea

Read our full conversation with some of the Parkland teens here.