It’s time for advocates of gun control to try the strategy that powered the civil rights movement: mass nonviolent civil disobedience
Fear powers the gun lobby, one of the most powerful forces in our politics today. Even though a majority of Americans favor tougher gun laws, like universal background checks, waiting periods, and bans on assault rifles, a very well-organized minority has more power. Remember, organized minorities beat disorganized majorities all the time.
Fear is what leads many Americans to buy guns in the first place. Even as crime rates have dropped from much higher levels in the latter third of the last century, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. The top reason that gun buyers give is their belief that owning a firearm will keep them safe from crime.
Fear is also what keeps Congress from acting to enact any sensible controls on guns, because nothing gets the attention of a Member of Congress more than a powerful lobby that can mobilize its supporters to cause someone to lose an election. As a result, if you buy Sudafed at a drugstore your name will go into a national database, but not if you buy an AR-15.
And I hate to say this, I think fear also keeps many people who favor gun control from taking more vigorous action. Images of heavily-armed civilians at state Capitols demanding that their “rights” not be infringed are designed to intimidate, and they do.
The only force more powerful than fear is love. Love for each other, and especially love for our children and siblings. Fierce love, the kind that rushes towards danger to protect loved ones. But also the love that refuses to hate other people if they have bad ideas. As Martin Luther King wrote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
We’re at another movement moment. The last mass shooting in a public school, the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, was unusual because — unlike nearly every other mass shooting — it led to a political movement, the March For Our Lives. Among the survivors that day were teenagers who were near adult age themselves. Unlike the traumatized survivors of so many other shootings, they knew each other beforehand and those social bonds made what came next, organized protest, more natural. They also had a lot of organizing capacity, thanks to a variety of unusual factors. Many had taken classes with an AP Government teacher who emphasized the importance of civics. Many were into theater, or as X Gonzalez put it to Dave Cullen in his book Parkland, “All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid.” One, David Hogg, was planning to become a journalist and thus had enough wits to use his phone to record live from a classroom hiding place while the shooter was roaming the school.
And many of them were naturally fluent with social media, so on the first night after the attack, when Cameron Kasky, of the leaders of what would become the March For Our Lives, posted on his Instagram page about his horrific experience, it was primed to go viral, fully aware of the “thoughts and prayers” responses that so many politicians express after such tragedies. “Please don’t pray for me. Your prayers do nothing. Show me you care in the polls.” Later that night he created a Twitter account, and posted this on Facebook: “Can’t sleep. Thinking about so many things. So angry that I’m not scare or nervous anymore. I’m just angry. And a little confused. Trying to get the word out and talk to people. … I just want people to understand what happened and understand that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that concept was so difficult to grasp.” Then he shared his social media handles on Instagram and Twitter and asked people to message him. “I want people talking about this. I can’t let this die like all the others. I need this to be the end. Everybody needs this to be the end. Talk to me.” The messages poured in.
Less than two months later nearly a half million people attended the big March For Our Lives in Washington, DC, and somewhere between 1.4 million and 2.1 million others rallied at more than 760 other locations nationwide. Only the first two Women’s Marches in 2017 and 2018 were bigger. And like the Women’s Marches, the March For Our Lives planted seeds all over the country. Young people at hundreds of colleges and high schools started local chapters, many of which are still highly active. But, sadly, none of this changed the power calculus in Congress.
Converting trauma and anger to the furious love that propels protest is just one step toward building power. And unfortunately, the kids who created MFOL followed a flawed theory of change. They believed that if enough of us registered and voted, we’d elect better representatives would pursue common-sense gun restrictions. They didn’t reckon with the lasting power built by the gun lobby or the way that rural states hold disproportionate power in the Senate, our least democratic body. They thought that mass media attention could sway the powers that be, and then, when that attention inevitably drifted away, so did the power they had managed to accumulate.
It’s time for a different strategy: mass civil disobedience. It’s what elevated the cause of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately broke the power of the segregationist South. It requires lots of individual training and communal support. And then it takes lots of people putting their bodies in places where they don’t belong in order to stop business as usual from continuing. It’s the one approach that could work and yet it has never really been tried by advocates for gun control.
Yes, something like a million kids walked out of 3000 schools a month after the Parkland shootings, previewing the big March For Our Lives rallies a few weeks later. (Amazing photos here.) And yes, Patricia Maisch, an older woman who helped tackle the shooter who targeted Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011, later was among a small group of eight protestors who temporarily and nonviolently snarled the Capitol Rotunda in 2016 before being arrested. And yes, that same year Rep. John Lewis led a group of his colleagues in sitting in on the floor of the House of Representatives to put pressure the then-Republican leaders of that chamber for not bringing up gun legislation. But while the kindling is there for massive protest marches again, we’ve never tried what actually worked for civil rights: organized, nonviolent, coordinated, ongoing stoppage of business as usual. There’s a call circulating now for mass walkouts tomorrow at noon ET; maybe this will be the beginning.
https://twitter.com/StudentsDemand/status/1529500534364848129
Maybe the older siblings of the kinds of kids who were senselessly killed yesterday in Uvarde, Texas, could lead the charge, in the same way that the thousands of high school and middle school students who walked out of the schools of Birmingham recharged the civil rights movement in 1963. The adults don’t seem like they’re going to change anything after all. It’s time for a new Children’s Crusade.