Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The #NeverAgain Movement Six Years Laterhttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/parkland-florida-never-again-march-for-our-lives-anniversary/Zachariah Sippy,Marie-Rose SheinermanFeb 14, 2024

After a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., on February 14, 2018, hundreds of thousands of young people pushed for stronger gun control measures. How has their advocacy changed since?

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Activism / StudentNation / February 14, 2024

The #NeverAgain Movement Six Years Later

After a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., on February 14, 2018, hundreds of thousands of young people pushed for stronger gun control measures. How has their advocacy changed since?

Zachariah Sippy and Marie-Rose Sheinerman
March for Our Lives Protest

Protesters participate in March for Our Lives II to protest against gun violence in June 2022.

(Sarah Morris / Getty)

Just weeks after surviving a mass shooting at their high school on February 14, 2018, Jaclyn Corin and David Hogg became part of a group of Parkland, Fla., students who helped galvanize a mass movement. Using the slogan #NeverAgain, the students inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to push for stronger gun control and safety measures.

A major milestone for the movement was the bipartisan federal Safer Communities Act of 2022, the first federal gun control law passed since 1994, which expanded funding for mental health resources, extended background checks to gun buyers under the age of 21, created new protections for domestic violence victims, cracked down on illegal gun purchases, among other measures. The act also incentivized states to establish red-flag laws, which enable courts to take firearms away from those deemed to present a danger to themselves or others. Such laws now exist in 21 states and the District of Columbia.

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Six years after the tragedy, many of these activists have shifted their thinking, strategy, and priorities. “We genuinely believed that we could prevent a shooting from ever happening again, because we were naïve,” Corin, now 23, told The Nation. “Now I understand that ‘Never Again’ is not realistic. And on one hand, that’s very devastating. But on the other hand, I think having a realistic perspective on the issue actually helps you maintain motivation.” 

Part of adopting a new perspective for Corin and other founders of March for Our Lives (MFOL) has required shifting energy away from demands like assault rifle bans to what she described as a wide array of “Band-Aid” solutions. And while this mindset can be a hard thing to swallow, she said, it’s led to real achievements for the movement—like the Safer Communities Act—and fuels her hope for the future.

“In Florida, we were able to pass gun laws with a Republican legislature after the shooting at my school,” said Hogg, referring to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. “It wasn’t as big as I would have liked. But it has stopped shootings.” Since the law’s passage in 2018, Florida judges have used the state’s red-flag provisions over 12,000 times. “We can only imagine how many of those people are alive today because the law was used in the first place.” 

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Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots group founded in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, told The Nation that she’s seen a “seismic shift” on the issue over the last decade. As just one benchmark, she pointed to the fact that in 2012, a quarter of Democrats in Congress had A ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA); today, none do. 

“We’ve flipped the script, and now the NRA is the third rail of American politics,” Hogg said. But the way that politicians approach the issue of gun safety isn’t the only change; Moms Demand Action themselves has broadened its vision.

“It started off about mass shootings,” said Watts, whose group is now part of Everytown for Gun Safety. She told The Nation that the most common reason cited by new volunteers was that their child experienced their first lockdown drill in school. “But I think the movement has evolved,” she said, explaining the shift from “focusing on what is about 1 percent of the gun violence in this country to really looking at it in a much broader way.”

In 2022, nearly 50,000 Americans died of a gun-related injury, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Fifty-six percent of gun deaths in the United States that year were suicides, while another 41 percent were homicides. Less than 2 percent of gun deaths in 2021 involved a shooting with more than four victims.

“We can’t be blind to the fact that Parkland doesn’t have shootings on a daily basis,” said Hogg. “It’s not because we have the strongest gun laws in the country. It’s because we have some of the most resources of any movement of any community in the country.” 

A 2022 CDC study found that areas with the highest poverty rates saw the greatest amount of gun-related deaths, including both suicides and homicides. Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by gun violence and were the victims of more than 61 percent of gun homicides in 2020, according to the Center for American Progress.

“Black and brown communities, particularly Black leaders in urban settings, have been doing this work—particularly Black women—for decades, before this was something in the public discourse,” Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action, told The Nation. “They were doing this because they are most impacted.”

To advocates, an important achievement has been seeing their own volunteers gain elected office, like Georgia Representative Lucy McBath, a former spokesperson for Moms Demand Action, and Florida Representative Maxwell Frost, the former national organizing director for MFOL and the first Gen-Z member of Congress.

Beyond the legislative and electoral victories of the past decade, one of the most meaningful achievements gun safety activists celebrate is the public’s attention and support for further reform measures. A Data for Progress survey in 2022 found that a quarter of adults under 30 ranked gun control among their top two political priorities. And 53 percent of likely voters said in a survey last month that they would favor the Biden administration using executive action to tackle gun violence.

Still, Harvard’s Institute of Politics recently found that less than 50 percent of young people are certain to vote in the presidential election this fall. And only 4 percent of young voters polled said that gun safety was a primary concern. “People are tired. They’re exhausted. They want change, and they want it right now,” said Ferrell-Zabala. “And this is something that unfortunately looks very incremental.”

To Corin, part of the apathy comes from an environment of hopelessness and a feeling that mass shootings are inevitable. “Red-flag laws in Florida have successfully prevented hundreds of shootings. And do people know about that? Probably not,” said Corin. “I think there needs to be better communication about the policies that do exist out there that successfully end gun violence.” 

“I think it’s a challenge to keep people motivated when it feels like you turn on the news and all you hear is someone has been shot,” Ferrell-Zabala added. “This is why it’s so important to reassure and let people know the progress that we have made.”

“I don’t think it’s hope that drives me,” Hogg explained. “I think it’s just that there’s nothing, there’s no other option but to keep going.”



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Why Young People in Argentina Backed Far-Right President-Elect Javier Milei https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/argentina-youth-javier-milei/Zachariah Sippy,Marie-Rose Sheinerman,Zachariah SippyNov 30, 2023

Young voters helped deliver a shocking first-place finish for Milei in the August open primaries, and almost 70 percent backed him in the November election.

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Politics / StudentNation / November 30, 2023

Why Young People in Argentina Backed Far-Right President-Elect Javier Milei 

Young voters helped deliver a shocking first-place finish for Milei in the August open primaries, and almost 70 percent backed him in the November election.

Zachariah Sippy
Argentina Youth Javier Milei
A young person holds a giant 100-dollar bill with Argentina president-elect Javier Milei’s face during a campaign rally in San Martin. (Luis Robayo / Getty)

Before Javier Milei won the presidency of South America’s second-largest economy in a runoff against Sergio Massa, the center-left candidate from the ruling Peronist party, Argentina was consumed by the presence of another electrifying figure: Taylor Swift.

Swift’s Eras Tour landed in Buenos Aires the week before the presidential election, and indeed her final show in the city on November 12 conflicted with the last debate between Milei and Massa. In the days prior to her arrival in the Nuñez neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where she was set to perform, pink posters began to appear. 

Inspired by Swift’s opposition to Marsha Blackburn in the 2018 Tennessee US Senate election and support for Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election, some fans of Swift had printed and plastered “Swiftie No Vota Milei” (Swifties Don’t Vote for Milei) on the sides of bus stops and construction sites. On the bottom of the posters, the parallel was made even more explicit with a hashtag “#MileiEsTrump” (Milei Is Trump). Some even more creative fans toyed with the assignment, producing photoshopped versions of Swift’s Era’s tour posters to preemptively celebrate Massa’s soon-to-be Presidential Era Tour. 

Local and international outlets, including the German and French national broadcasters, ran with the story; the mix of popular culture, international fandom, and global politics proved to be irresistible. In similar fashion, earlier this month, a New York Times headline proclaimed, “The New Enemies of Argentina’s Far Right: Swifties and the BTS Army.” 

The only problem? In Argentina, young people flocked to Javier Milei and his far-right party. Voters under the age of 29 delivered a shocking first-place finish for Milei in the August open primaries, and then later a whopping 11-point victory in the runoff. Almost 70 percent of young voters backed Milei in the November election (with surveyed men demonstrating a slightly greater preference for him than their female peers).

So important and central was the youth vote to Milei’s campaign that in his unprecedented endorsement of the far-right firebrand, the neoliberal former president Mauricio Macri, whose center-right party failed to make the runoff, called on his fellow party members “to have the humility to follow the youth… They have made their decision and they deserve our support.” 

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Of course, in a country with nearly 140 percent annual inflation, 60 percent of youth falling below the poverty line, and the average income having dropped consistently in the last decade to around $450 a month, it’s unsurprising that so many young voters were sick of the incumbent Peronist party. This financial crisis also helps to explain why the attempts to leverage Swift’s popularity for Massa’s presidential campaign fell flat.

The most obvious forces of American imperialism in Argentina, such as the ones that demand the devaluation of the peso, or back anti-Peronist dictatorships, also have a softer cultural face that looks something like sold-out Taylor Swift concerts. Agustina, a 25 year-old legal assistant from the Buenos Aires working-class suburbs, explained to me that in her experience, while “the American middle class loves America, the Argentine middle class hates their own country. They want to be Americans.” The combination of hard and soft imperial technologies can encourage many young Argentines to want to be anything but. Indeed, 70 percent of young Argentines say they want to emigrate

Milei embraced this dejection and offered an anti-patriotic nationalism. He argued that the country had fallen into despair, decay, and impoverishment for decades—if not more than a century—and that Argentina ought to return to its 19th-century liberal, free-trading principles. It was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world, he said, and should still be a First World power, but instead its currency is worth less than “excrement.” During the first presidential debate, Milei proclaimed that “in 50 years we will be the world’s biggest shanty town” if Argentina continues on its current path. “But if you give me 20 [years, we will be like] Germany. If you give me 35: the United States.”

The self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist’s signature policy, famously, is his promise to do away with the Argentine peso, shut down the nation’s Central Bank, forgo monetary sovereignty, and adopt the US dollar as Argentina’s legal tender. His campaign aides and allies often donned MAGA hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and oversize cardboard US $100 bills plastered with Milei’s face were a typical sight at rallies. 

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Beyond dollarization, other parts of Milei’s platform make plain his wannabe-American political visions. He has called for the right to bear arms (Argentina does not have anything like the Second Amendment, and most other candidates, even those on the right, have opposed this proposal) and replacing the public education system with charter schools and vouchers (another policy not backed by the the traditional center-right party); has claimed that climate change is a communist hoax; regularly invokes the notion that the state participates in pedophilia; hopes to orient the country toward the United States and Israel and away from China and Brazil, its biggest trading partners; wants to turn the clock back on abortion rights; has questioned if Biden won the US presidential election in 2020 and asserted baselessly that fraud has occurred throughout his country’s own electoral process. 

It is unsurprising that his out-of-the-ordinary hairdo and career as a television personality have elicited comparisons to Donald Trump, a likeness he has proudly embraced. Tip O’Neil’s famous quip has been turned on its head. No longer is all politics local; today, all politics are global. In August, shortly after winning the primaries, Milei sat down for a one-on-one interview with Tucker Carlson. And soon after Milei won, Trump took to social media to proclaim that it was time to “Make Argentina Great Again!”

If the left-wing Pink Tide first came, and returned, to Latin American politics championing a vision of a proud Third World nationalism, solidarity, and integration, it is unsurprising that the present right-wing riptide in the region offers a different vision, one of self-loathing, and a shift in orientation away from countries with shared histories and languages and toward global hegemons and international music stars.

On Sunday night, before he took the stage to proclaim victory, a member of Milei’s team switched out the podium’s placard. In lieu of the hotel’s logo, or that of his party, a different image appeared: a newly designed seal of the office of the Argentine president-elect, with a sketch of the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s White House equivalent) in the middle. 

Argentine media immediately picked up on the parallels. A news anchor explained the seal to an unfamiliar audience. “It is an idea based…or copied from an American tradition. In Argentina we always used our patriotic seal. What did Milei do? Nothing with the Patriotic Seal. ‘Let’s make our own new seal!’ Oriented towards where? The United States.” 



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The Supreme Court Is Hearing Directly From Victims of Gun Violence. Will It Listen?https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/scotus-march-for-our-lives/Zachariah Sippy,Marie-Rose Sheinerman,Zachariah Sippy,Zachariah SippyNov 5, 2021

In the summer of 2019, Elimar Depaula, 19, worked as a paralegal in the D.C. suburbs. At night, she was a student, taking online college classes. On August 8, she and her boyfriend went for a drive to visit a friend. Depaula’s boyfriend, at the wheel, accidentally cut off another driver. The other driver was incensed; he tailgated Depaula and her boyfriend, yelled at them, brandished a gun in anger, and eventually fired his weapon, shooting Depaula.

As she was bleeding on the way to the hospital, she prayed and tried to stay awake, fearing death. But when she arrived at the emergency entrance, Depaula found herself unable to move her legs and was unable to exit the car. In the following hours, after doctors attended to her, they informed Depaula that she was now paralyzed from the waist down. She spent the subsequent month in a rehabilitation facility, relearning tasks that had previously been automatic to her. And though her doctors doubted that it would be possible, Depaula, now 21, is able to walk through the use of a walker and determination. But Depaula didn’t return to school. “It was too much, with the recovery and everything, so I never went back,” she said.

On November 3, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. According to Andrew Bank, an attorney at Hogan Lovells working for March For Our Lives, the case has the potential to be one of the most significant gun safety legislation decisions before the court in more than a decade. New York State currently requires licenses for possessing and carrying firearms in public, but the New York Rifle & Pistol Association is suing the state government, arguing that the permitting process is a violation of their constitutional rights under the Second Amendment.

Prior Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago extended a near-unlimited ability for individuals to possess guns in their own homes. If the plaintiffs are to prevail in NYSRPA, this right would extend into public spaces, potentially making every state more like Texas, where few, if any, limits are placed on the carrying of handguns outside of the home.

This case is of particular concern to gun safety activists like David Hogg, the founder of March For Our Lives and survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Hogg told me that he fears that “the infiltration of our court system by organizations like the NRA, and the Federalist Society, with their grotesque, extremist interpretations of the Second Amendment” might result in a ruling that would exacerbate gun violence. Hogg and his colleagues at March For Our Lives began to brainstorm about ways they could show the court the “the true, real human toll” of gun violence, beyond harrowing statistics. They decided to submit an amicus brief. “We wanted the justices to know that this decision, and future decisions based on this case are going to mostly affect young people, because we’re going to have to live with the legacy of whatever decision that they are making,” Hogg said.

But this brief differs from the more traditional, typical structure of an amicus brief. Instead of being full of legal arguments speaking to theories of constitutional interpretation, the MFOL Action Fund’s brief focuses on telling the stories of seven young people (and one high school teacher turned state legislator) affected by gun violence. March For Our Lives Judicial Associate Matt Post hoped that the brief would serve as an important intervention. “For too long, the conversation around gun violence has centered on talking points and theoretical scenarios. But by filing this storytelling amicus brief, we’re hoping to ground the case in the actual devastating consequences of gun violence on our generations’ lives.” The constitutional questions at stake, for Post, extended beyond the right to “keep and bear arms.” “How am I supposed to exercise my right to free speech, vote, live, or pursue happiness if I can’t make it out of the classroom alive?” he asked.

For Hogg, the brief succeeds not only on its legal or storytelling merits. As a survivor of gun violence, he said, “we are told we’re too emotional to speak.… we’re just victims not able to say or do anything.” To him “what’s powerful about [the brief] is it’s survivors speaking for themselves.”

In recent months, Depaula began to share her story on social media, especially TikTok. “Before my accident,” she said, “I didn’t even think about this stuff.… So then I decided to post about my story, hoping it can help other people.” It was through Depaula’s TikTok and Snapchat posts that the March For Our Lives’s judicial advocacy team first reached out to see if she would be interested in sharing her story with the court. “So long as it’s helping, I have no problem sharing with people,” she told me.

Brandon Wolf, 33, is another survivor whose story was captured in the MFOL Action Fund’s brief. He was at the Pulse club the night of the shooting, when 50 people, including two of his friends, were murdered. Wolf shared that after the massacre he constantly feared that he would forget his best friend. “I listened to voicemails, I saved an old T-shirt, so I would remember the way he smelt,” Wolf said. “But on top of that I worried that the world would never get to hear his story, or know him.” The amicus brief provided relief to Wolf, as his friend’s “story, life and legacy” would now be heard before the Supreme Court.

Wolf, Depaula, and the six others affected by gun violence were interviewed earlier this year by the March For Our Lives judicial advocacy team along with their attorneys. Working together, they compiled and synthesized the interviews, and submitted the brief to the court in September. I asked Depaula what she hoped the brief would achieve. She paused, and said: “I just hope that [the court] can see where I’m coming from. What if what happened to me happened to your daughter, or your son?”



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