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How student activism, particularly the use of social media, played a pivotal role in bringing the issue of gun control back on the national political agenda in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. It highlights the students' demands for gun law reforms and the subsequent changes in laws and policies. The document also critiques the research deficiencies on youth civic participation and the role of social media in political activism.
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Cohn, Jesse & Teruelle, Rhon (201 9 ). When the “Children” Speak for Themselves, Democratic Communiqué , Vol. 2 8 ., No. 2 2019 pp. 1– 13.
2 Cohn & Teruelle | When the “Children” aybe — just maybe — we are changing the political calculus,” Paul Begala speculated in the months following the massacre of twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14,
4 Cohn & Teruelle | When the “Children” in the infantile situation is the conformist and the apolitical person, for they accept the Law without any discussion and do not want to participate in shaping it” (1997, p. 93). All of this makes it that much more important to ask why the Parkland students consciously identified themselves as “children” precisely in order to indicate their reliance on “the adults” to make proper decisions. Tactical self-representation: “We’re children” To address “lawmakers and Congress,” interpellating them as “the adults” (CNN 2018b), posed a paradox. On the morning after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a student survivor, David Hogg, stood in front of CNN’s cameras to demand that adults act in place of “the children” – “the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,” as Edelman put it (2004, p. 3). The demand presupposes that the one voicing it is incompetent to act, standing in a place marked by dependency and subordination. This risked every one of the predictable responses heard two weeks later, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. For instance, far-right pundit Katie Hopkins professed to “feel sorry for them,” but characterized them as “children who are upset,” ostensibly not “in a good pragmatic place to make political decisions,” and suggested that they were being “manipulated by the media” (NowThis News 2018). The place of “children,” for the NRA and its surrogates, was not to speak but – as emotional, immature, vulnerable, and incapable of engaging in a politics of their own – to be spoken for. In short, this was representational politics par excellence : those who “could not represent themselves... had to be represented,” reinscribing “a separation between those who are holders of power and those who are subject to it” (Tormey 2006, pp. 93, 100). At the same time, self-identifying as children turned out to be a tactic that distinguished Parkland from Newtown: the child victims of 2012, who “could not represent themselves... had to be represented” by parent-led gun-control advocacy groups and media coverage. Media framing of the shooting unhelpfully focused on the perpetrator (reinforcing conservative narratives about mass shootings as fundamentally unpredictable events, attributable perhaps to an ill-defined “mental illness,” or simply to an incomprehensible evil, “the devil”) and on the victims (memorialized as “angels,” eliciting sentimental and religious responses – “thoughts and prayers” – but not organizing or action) (Chaney & Robertson 2013). By contrast, the phrase “ we’re children” announced something quite different. In the act of speaking , by speaking as one of the “children,” Hogg and his fellow student activists called into existence a new collective agent, claiming the right to speak for themselves , preempting representation, even taking a step beyond representation into autonomous action. As some commentators have observed, this tactic of preemptive self-representation successfully shifted media attention away from the act of the individual perpetrator and toward the collective inaction of lawmakers (Bump 2018), giving rise, in the process, to a powerful narrative about the students’ own agency. We can perhaps see this emerge most vividly in the speech delivered by Emma González on February 17, 2018 (subsequently drawing 3.4 million views on YouTube). Responding directly to President Trump’s tweet framing the shooting as the work of a “mentally disturbed,” “bad” individual, the young survivor foregrounded the responsibility of adults – “the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn’t take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies.” Building
Democratic Communiqué | Vol. 28., No. 2 2019^5 on the refrain, “we call BS,” González indicted adult politicians for the very apathy and irresponsibility (Castoriadis’ “conformis[m]” and “apolitic[ism]”) that are perennially attributed to young people: [M]aybe the adults have gotten used to saying “it is what it is,” but if us students have learned anything, it's that if you don’t study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it’s time to start doing something... The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self- involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS... They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS. (CNN 2018a) With each new invocation of this theme, González contributed to the emerging narrative of the “we” (“us students,” “us kids”) as a powerful new force – active, iconoclastic, self-aware, and critical. To an extent, this was itself the construction of another illusion, that of a movement suddenly erupting from nowhere; when in fact, considerable organizational and institutional groundwork had been laid in previous years, both by largely white and suburban parents’ organizations such as Moms Demand Action, constructed in response to Newtown (Stuart, 2018), and by largely non-white urban youth movements like the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, constructed in response to the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012 (Zornick, 2018). If Polletta (1998) and Wood (2017) are correct in arguing that it is precisely the “gaps” and “ambiguities” in social movement narratives, their failure to provide a clear cut framing for collective action, that draw those not yet involved into “emotional and psychic connection” with activists, then perhaps the mystique of a seemingly spontaneous and entirely self-organizing youth movement is partly to be credited for the rapid spread of #NeverAgain across the country – indeed, this may speak to the paradoxical power of “we’re children.” The two hundred miles’ distance between Sanford, Florida, the site of Trayvon Martin’s murder (43.1% white alone, median household income $42,025), and Parkland, Florida (65.9% white alone, median household income $131,525) is indeed great, even if Parkland is considerably more racially diverse than Newtown was in 2013 (88.2% white alone, median household income $116,024) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c), posing another problem of representation: how to avoid falling into the trap of “worthy victim” discourse (Schildkraut & Muschert, 2013), constructing an exclusively white and wealthy “we”? Given the much higher death toll of everyday gun violence in comparison to all school shootings, it is hard to avoid concluding, in the words of Marjory Stoneman Douglas student activist Jaclyn Corin, that “Parkland received more attention because of its affluence” (Hamedy 2018). In acknowledgement of their
Democratic Communiqué | Vol. 28., No. 2 2019^7 tweet: “It hurts every time I see these headlines and then the political inaction... but we have the power to change it. Squirrel Hill my heart is with you. We will fight for you every single day.” 5,100 people liked the tweet and 1,105 commented about it. Hogg was not alone in his criticism of the NRA. On the same day, three other individuals had similar sentiments as their messages to the NRA which echoed Hogg’s were likewise found on Twitter. Christopher Leone tweeted: “Fuck the @NRA. Vote out these corrupt, do-nothing @GOP motherfuckers. Marti Gould Cummings tweeted: “BAN GUNS NOW!!! Fuck the @NRA the @GOP.” And Fred Guttenberg, the father of Jaime Guttenberg who died at the Marjory Stoneman High School shooting tweeted: “‘Thoughts and Prayers.’ To be honest, my faith was rocked on Feb 14th. The only way that expression works now is that I pray we vote every NRA politician from office and elect those committed to our safety, to decency, and civility. I love this country. Time to vote!!!” In addition to expressing his sorrow, Guttenberg echoes one of the students’ rallying cry to vote those who support the NRA out of office and change America’s existing gun laws. In their attempt to fight back, supporters of the NRA, such as Fox News host Laura Ingraham have launched a variety of attacks on Hogg and his peers. On March 28, 2018, she chastised Hogg as a “gun rights provocateur” and mocked his inability to gain acceptance to four University of California schools, tweeting: “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA… totally predictable given acceptance rates.)” In so doing, Ingraham framed Hogg as the Bad Child, “whin[y]” and self- centered. In so doing, however, she inadvertently presented the spectacle of an adult attacking a “child,” inviting public outrage. Hogg identified companies that regularly bought advertising on Ingraham’s show and urged them to terminate their contract with Fox. By the time Ingraham apologized to Hogg, the damage had been done: several of her sponsors terminated their advertising contract with Fox. “We are in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham’s program,” Nutrish tweeted (Wang & Chiu 2018). Wang & Chiu (2018) also noted that “TripAdvisor pointed to one of its company values — ‘We are better together’ — in its decision to stop advertising with Ingraham’s show.” In ending their advertising support for Ingraham’s show, Wayfair told the Hill that “Ingraham’s personal criticism of Hogg was ‘not consistent with our values’” (Wang & Chiu 2018). As evidenced by these three examples, Ingraham’s attack on Hogg had very real consequences. Emma González is another of the student survivors who was catapulted to fame largely because of her involvement on Twitter. Using the handle @Emma4Change, González created her Twitter account shortly after the shooting at her school and now has 1.6 million followers. Her powerful speech during the March For Our Lives event included the now historic four and a half-minute silent pause and cries of “We call BS!” Even before the event, however, González utilized Twitter to advocate for changes in America. On February 18, 2018, González tweeted the following: “My friends an i have been hard at work at North Community Park calling attention to @NeverAgainMSD and @AMarch4OurLives It's time for change. Lets make it happen. #neveragain #march4ourlives.” This tweet received 29.3k likes and 9.1k retweets. And a pinned tweet on her Twitter page that was created on March 23, 2018 includes an accompanying video of veterans speaking out about gun violence in America and the need for gun reform: “I have absolutely no words... Thank you not only for your service but for standing with us as we
8 Cohn & Teruelle | When the “Children” #MarchForOurLives tomorrow all over the world #VeteransForGunReform #GunControlNow #NeverAgain https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/veterans.” A sampling of González’s tweets provides clear evidence of the students’ tactical use of social media in their struggle against the NRA. In the first tweet, González illustrates how Twitter is being used to help organize the @March4OurLives even in DC, and in the second, she helps to promote a video made by veterans calling for gun reform in America. Just like Hogg, González received backlash for her involvement in the movement. Congressman Steve King, a far-right Republican from Iowa, criticized González for wearing a small Cuban flag on her jacket with an accompanying meme: “This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don't speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense.” Attacks on González and her fellow students often focused on identity, as when she and others were “smeared falsely as ‘crisis actors’ by conspiracy theorists and hoaxers on the Internet” (see Paquette 2018; and Rosenberg 2018). Indeed, Alex Jones, who had successfully spread the “crisis actor” narrative after Newtown, and Republican politician Mary Franson, amplifying the representation of the student survivors as inappropriate political agents, each compared the students to the Hitler Youth: “Authoritarianism,” Jones declared, “is always about youth marches” (Rosenberg 2018). After some public pushback, both Jones and Franson released statements apologizing for their actions. The very tactics that Jones had notably deployed with such success before — sowing “information disorder” as a means of disrupting ethical public discourse in the wake of a crisis — had for once proven ineffectual (Sellnow, Parrish & Semenas 2019). Like Hogg and González, Delaney Tarr, who was instrumental on Twitter after the shooting, continues to advocate for gun safety and an end to gun violence. A prime example of her online advocacy appears in a response to Elizabeth Warren. On August 3, 2019, Warren tweeted about the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas: “The news out of El Paso is devastating. I'm heartbroken for the victims and their families. Far too many communities have suffered through tragedies like this already. We must act now to end our country's gun violence epidemic.” Tarr responds to Warren’s tweet with an article about an upcoming forum for Democratic candidates sponsored by two prominent gun control organizations and the following offer: “Then you should come to our gun safety forum. Let’s end gun violence, together.” Tarr’s tweet garnered 754 likes and 60 retweets, and the forum was attended by Warren and the rest of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. When, shortly after the El Paso shooting, another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio occured, Tarr responded: “9 killed and 26 injured. In less than a minute. These are human lives being ripped away. Enough fucking thoughts and prayers. Give me action. Give me anger. Give me some REASONABLE FUCKING GUN LAWS.” Tarr’s rhetoric, by puncturing the imagery of childhood “innocence” and cliché-ridden decorum (“thoughts and prayers”), aims at puncturing the public affect of numbness surrounding mass shootings, turning sorrow into “anger” and “action.” The Parkland students have not let up on their demands for gun control, and have been anointed the new “Twitter influencers” (Wootson, Jr. 2018). This very notoriety has become a focus for attacks: if Alex Jones was largely unsuccessful in branding them as “crisis actors,” others, drawing on the rhetorical repertoire used to delegitimize youth activism in general, have
10 Cohn & Teruelle | When the “Children” Kansas.” Notably, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker — once a rising star of the GOP, who had survived a serious challenge from the left in 2011- 2012 — lost the gubernatorial race despite over a million-dollar support from the NRA. Moreover, even some NRA-backed politicians that retained their seats saw a significant decline in their margins of victory. For one, Florida Republican Rick Scott narrowly defeated Democrat Bill Nelson in an extremely close race. Undoubtedly, these results speak positively for the shift towards gun control, as many of the upstart winners were Democrats who are in strong support of legislative gun control, to the chagrin of the NRA. Some 14 months after the shooting, long after the initial crisis cycle had ended, the first Democratic presidential debate attested to the lasting presence of the students’ social media activism: one after the next, the candidates paid tribute to the “Parkland kids” while competing to stake out persuasive policy positions on gun control (Man 2019). While definitive, strategic victories remain elusive, the Parkland students have used tactical social media to help fundamentally shift the parameters of the national conversation on gun control. In the words of Emma González’s Twitter bio: “Change? in my country? it’s likelier than you think.” Reference List Astor, M. (2018, March 8). Florida Gun Bill: What’s In It, and What Isn’t. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/florida-gun-bill.html. Banaji, S. and Buckingham, D. (2009). The Civic Sell. Information, Communication & Society , 12 (8): 1197-1223. Begala, P. (2013, May 6). The Price Is Right on Gun Control. Newsweek. Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com/paul-begala-price-right-gun-control- 63215. Bump, P. (2018, February 28). The gun-control discussion has had unusual staying power post- Parkland. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ politics/wp/2018/02/28/the-gun-control-discussion-has-had-unusual-staying-power- post-parkland/. Castoriadis, C. (1997). The Imaginary Institution of Society (K. Blamey, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chaney, C., & Robertson, R. V. (2013). Media Reporting of the “Sandy Hook Elementary School Angels.” Journal of Pan African Studies , 6 (5): 74-114. Childress, S. (2013, December 10). How the Gun-Rights Lobby Won After Newtown. Retrieved November 4, 2019, from Frontline website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/ how-the-gun-rights-lobby-won-after-newtown/. CNN. (2018a). Florida student Emma Gonzalez to lawmakers and gun advocates: “We call BS.” Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez- speech/index.html. ____. (2018b). Student to lawmakers: We’re children, you are the adults. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2018/02/15/student-survivor-need-action-or-students-die- sot-newday.cnn. Doak, M. J. (2011). Children and Families in the United States. In Information Plus Reference Series. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints (2011 ed.). Retrieved from https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ1529300101/OVIC?u=hamm11355&sid=OVIC&xid=ff
Democratic Communiqué | Vol. 28., No. 2 2019^11 71c7b8. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press. Flanagan, C. A. & Syversten, A. K. (2006). Youth as a social construct and social actor. In L. Sherrod (Ed.), Youth activism: An international encyclopedia, vol. 1 (pp. 11-19). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Foderaro, L. W., & Hussey, K. (2018, February 17). In Wake of Florida Massacre, Gun Control Advocates Look to Connecticut. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/nyregion/florida-shooting-parkland-gun-control- connecticut.html Foley, R. J. (2019, February 10). Gun-seizure laws grow in popularity since Parkland shooting. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://apnews.com/3d5722abc06245b4b931933f253e3743?fbclid=IwAR2zxWLSY7MK
Democratic Communiqué | Vol. 28., No. 2 2019^13 pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk. __________________. (2019b). 2013-2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/ pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk. Wallerstein, I. M., & Wallerstein, S. R. I. (2004). World-systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press. Wang, A.B. & Chiu, A. (2018, March 29). Facing boycott, Laura Ingraham apologizes for taunting Parkland teen over college rejections. Jacksonville.com. Retrieved November 9, 2019 from https://www.jacksonville.com/entertainmentlife/20180329/facing- boycott-laura-ingraham-apologizes-for-taunting-parkland-teen-over-college-rejections. Weiss, B. (2018, April 1). Here are the laws that David Hogg and student gun-control activists from Parkland actually want to pass. AOL.com. Retrieved November 9, 2019 from https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/04/01/here-are-the-laws-that-david-hogg-and-stu dent-gun-control-activists-from-parkland-actually-want-to-pass/23400298/. Wood, L. (2017). Waves of Protest, the Eros Effect, and the Social Relations of Diffusion. In J. Del Gandio & A. K. Thompson (Eds.), Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (pp. 251–268). SUNY Press. Wootson, Jr. C. R. (2018). NRA host taunts Parkland teens: ‘No one would know your names’ if classmates were still alive. The Washington Post. Retrieved on November 9, 2019 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/24/nra-host-taunts- parkland-teens-no-one-would-know-your-names-if-classmates-were-still-alive/. Yablon, A. and Nass, D. (2018, November 5). Guns and the 2018 Midterms: The Results in 24 Key Races. Retrieved from https://www.thetrace.org/2018/11/nra- 2018 - election-results- gun-vote/. Zornick, G. (2018, April 3). How the #NeverAgain Movement Is Disrupting Gun Politics. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-neveragain- movement-is-disrupting-gun-politics/. Jesse Cohn is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Purdue University Northwest. He is the author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848- 2011 (AK Press, 2015), and is currently working on a book about the strange elevation of science fiction and fantasy to a central position in contemporary culture. Reality outstrips his imagination on a regular basis. Rhon Teruelle is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication and Social Media at Purdue University Northwest. Prior to moving to the US, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Calgary in the Department of Communication, Media & Film. His research focuses on social media and civic mobilization in relation to social movements and collective action, the social implications of social media, and politics. His work has appeared in Canadian Journal of Communication, Social Alternatives, and Teaching and Learning.
