By: Teresa Mull
Coming to a town near you this summer: Parkland, Florida school shooting survivors touting increased gun control and registering voters.
The “March for Our Lives: Road to Change” tour, which one student said is about “exposing people who take money from the NRA and registering people to vote,” is being led by David Hogg. Hogg emerged as the young face of gun control in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, along with his outspoken classmate, Emma González.
The tour will begin June 15 and cover 50 stops in 20 states, The Hill reported, and aims to take advantage of the more than 4 million Americans who turn 18 this year and will be eligible to vote.
The students are calling for: “universal, comprehensive background checks; creating a searchable database for gun owners; funding the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence; … and banning high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic assault rifles,” according to axios.com.
“If you don’t support this, … it’ll look like you’re going against kids,” González said in an interview.
Despite the youthful, anti-gun narrative pushed by the mainstream media, “…Past polling suggests that people younger than 30 in the U.S. are no more liberal on gun control than their parents or grandparents,” NPR reported in February.
“Over the past three years, [the editor of Gallup’s] polling organization asked the under-30 crowd whether gun laws in the U.S. should be made more strict, less strict or kept as they are now,” NPR reported. “On average, people between the ages of 18 and 29 were 1 percentage point more likely to say gun laws should be more strict than the overall national average of 57 percent.”
Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at [email protected].
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