Consider This from NPR - March For Our Lives Co-Founder David Hogg Is Still Angry, Five Years On

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

On March 24, 2018, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Washington, D.C. to demand an end to gun violence. That was also the start of the March For Our Lives movement, which continues to call on young people to make their voices heard through the ballot box.Survivors of a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida organized that first march. One of them was David Hogg. NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with Hogg about the triumphs and frustrations of the past five years and the movement's hopes for the future. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Five years ago, on March 24th, 2018, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, filled the streets of Washington, D.C., demanding an end to gun violence. Thirty-eight days earlier, a gunman had entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and shot 17 people to death. It was the survivors of that massacre,

high schoolers infuriated about what they and their classmates had just gone through, who organized that historic march and hundreds of simultaneous demonstrations across the world. They called their movement the March for Our Lives. 17-year-old Cameron Caskey was one of the massacre survivors who took the stage that day. To the leaders, skeptics, and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn. Welcome to the revolution.

It is a powerful and peaceful one because it is of, by, and for the young people of this country. Another survivor, ex-Gonzalez, read the names of their murdered classmates and then, for several minutes, stood in silence on the stage before saying this. Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds. The time it took for the gunman to carry out his massacre on the high school. Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job. Another survivor, David Hogg, was not yet old enough to vote that day, nor were many of his classmates or other students in the massive crowd.

But they soon would be able to vote. And their votes, he said, would be the tool they'd soon have to hold politicians accountable for their failures on gun control. Now, who here is going to vote in the 2018 election? If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking. They've gotten used to being protective of their position, chewing safety, the safety of inaction. Inaction is no longer safe. And to that we say, no more.

Consider this. The March for Our Lives, five years ago today, was the event that drew a generation of young people into politics and civic engagement for the first time in their lives. And it made gun control the issue that drove huge numbers of young voters to the ballot box. In the years since, the young people behind that movement have worked to sustain its momentum, even as substantive gun control has remained elusive. There was a poll that came out last year that March for Our Lives did

that showed that one of the top issues that is driving young people to turn out and vote and support candidates is gun violence prevention and gun reform. The leading cause of death for young people is gun violence in this country. After the break, we speak with March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg on the triumphs and frustrations of the last five years and the movement's hopes for the future. From NPR, I'm Adrian Florido. It, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The school massacre in Parkland, Florida in 2018,

and the student-led March for Our Lives that survivors organized just weeks later, galvanized young Americans to political action like few things in recent history have. Almost two-thirds of the young people who we spoke to right after the 2018 election said that they had paid some or a lot of attention to the news about the Parkland shooting. And some said it influenced their vote a lot. This is Abby Kisa from CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Having young people in the media, having young people leading, you know, something happening at their high school shows other young people that this is something that can be for them. And that is a message that young people do not get every day.

The Parkland survivors became gun control advocates almost overnight, and they seized on their tragedy to draw other young people to their cause. Researchers like Hesa, who've studied what happened next, say it worked. And not only for a short time. To this day, she says, gun control remains a top issue for many of the nation's young voters. It stayed an issue, even while other significant things have come into play in national politics since then. Even so, sustaining the movement's momentum has not been easy, despite the fact that the number of mass shootings in the U.S. has continued to grow.

The young activists who emerged from the March for Our Lives have won small victories across the country, but they've also been frustrated over and over by intransigence in Washington and the power of the nation's gun lobby. Yet they've continued looking for ways to keep gun violence prevention at the front of American minds. David Hogg was 17 when he survived the Parkland shooting and co-founded the March for Our Lives. Today, he's 22 and a senior at Harvard, but still sits on the organization's board of directors. He shows up often and vocally at protests across the country and in the halls of Congress to lobby for gun control. When I spoke with him today, I asked him, what about that march five years ago still sticks in his mind? I think the thing I remember that day was just how much hope we had.

And the looks on so many people's faces who have gone through the worst thing imaginable, losing a child or losing a sibling or loved one to gun violence, how their faces, which are often so understandably stoic and sad and hopeless, you know, were lit up and really felt like they had hope. I think what really resonated with a lot of people about that march was that it was children standing up to say, you know, stop killing us. You were teenagers, but you were still children. How much do you think that that was the source of your movement's power?

I think it was a major source. We, of course, didn't see ourselves as kids. We saw ourselves as young adults and activists. But looking back on it now, I have had my perspective shifted in that I understand why even looking at myself then and a lot of our other students, now I can see myself as the kid that I was that I think so many other people saw us as. And it's really started to enable me to understand why people were so excited and hopeful, because it was the young people standing up and it felt like a shift change.

Did that feel unfair though, to have to be the young people standing up as opposed to other people, adults standing up? At the time, I don't think it did. But now looking back on it, I'm angry for my past self. I'm angry looking at us as the kids that we were and knowing that I should have been able to be focused on my grades and go into college as my top priority, not ending gun violence. And I'm just so angry for my past self

and the other young people that were with us and the young people who were marching with us around the country and around the world, because it really should not be on kids to tell the adults, get their act together. It shouldn't be on kids to say, we deserve the right to survive math class. Five years after that march, many of you who organized it no longer are children. You're now young adults who are voting and still trying to use this issue of gun violence and gun control to draw more young people into the political process. Do you feel that that work has gotten harder or easier since you started doing this? I think it's probably gotten easier, unfortunately. And the reason why I say that that's unfortunate is because the reason it's gotten easier is because gun violence has gotten worse. More set a major cultural shift for our generation where, you know, it's kind of an expectation that you care about politics or that you care about the

issues that are affecting us, that are literally killing us in our communities and in our schools every day. And as a result of that, there are more people that want to be involved. We have young people running for state legislature, for example, like a young man named Jasper Martis in the Michigan state legislature who got involved with politics when he was just, I think he's 17 years old with the first March for Our Lives. He went to MSU, graduated,

and now after the shooting at MSU, he ran for office after graduating and now is one of the youngest state representatives in Michigan. It's people like Maxwell Frost who also are helping lead this change and inspiring our generation to step up and get involved on the inside too, because he formerly worked with March for Our Lives as our first national organizing director, and now he is

the youngest member of Congress. Both fortunately and unfortunately, things have gotten easier. You have had some successes at the local and even federal level with gun control, but not anything close to the kind of substantive gun control that you would like to see. What's been the most frustrating part of this work for you? How much time do you have? We have been historically very reactive. When there's a shooting, the country is enraged and people want to do something urgently and act now. We have to get out there before there is a shooting and show up regularly every single year. The gun lobby and gun rights activists show up every single year with a couple hundred people

at state legislatures and they flood their call lines. They show up in all of the hearings and everything like that. And unless there's been a major shooting in the past year, that doesn't happen a lot of the time with our movement, not nearly as much as it should. And we need those parents who say to me, wow, my generation really messed up, but we're glad that you kids are here to save us. We need those parents to show up with us and not just say, okay, like the kids have it. We don't. We are young and we are feisty and we want change badly, but we can't do this alone. We need people of all ages and all backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and incomes to show up with us at state legislatures to help create that change proactively so that you don't become a gun violence prevention activist

after you've lost your child or your brother or sister to gun violence. What's been the most gratifying part of this work for you? Last year, I was on kitchen cabinet calls in my dining hall every Thursday morning at 9 a.m. for Maxwell Frost. He was a long shot candidate. And 48 hours ago, I was in his office for the first time in Washington, D.C., in Congress. And I was there with Patricia and Manny Oliver, the parents of Joaquin Oliver, who died when he was 17 years old, when he was murdered in my high school. After his family, mind you, came here fleeing violence in Venezuela to Parkland, only to have their son die. And they

talked about how hard it is obviously going through what they went through and losing a child to gun violence, but how much hope at the same time it's given them to see Joaquin's legacy as they talked about live on in the activists of March for Our Lives and the movement and people like Maxwell now going into Congress. because their whole philosophy from the beginning has been that Joaquin is not a victim, he's an activist. And to see them tearing up at the fact that now we're sitting in the youngest member of Congress's office, who is directly from March for Our Lives, that yes, this work is very hard. There are many setbacks that we have, and it's going to take a long time to get through it. But I know if people like the Olivers can keep doing this and thousands of other parents across the country

in a similar position to them can keep doing this, the rest of the movement can as well. March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adrian Flaherty. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

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