What We Can Learn From The Youth-Led Movement On Gun Reform
By Felix Schein & Mackenzie Long
Across the nation yesterday thousands of students walked out of their classrooms to articulate one sanguine message: Their futures are worth fighting for, even in the absence of help from the adults charged with their safekeeping.
Without respite, these students have captivated a nation that has long struggled to find solutions to its outsized problem of gun violence and mass shootings. It isn’t easy to accept that American students — kids really, some as young as 10 — have had to take to the streets to protest our collective inaction around gun reform. And it shouldn’t be. This movement is a shameful reflection of our collective failure. But it is also a lesson in where the road forward lies.
We at RALLY continue to be in awe of these young people who have been so steadfast in their fight for a basic right to survival. As political communications consultants, we see their social media advocacy, their grassroots organizing, and their success in building and advancing a narrative, as the stuff dreams are made of. We’ve written on these students’ digital fluency, and their success in pushing corporate America to become allies on this issue, but at the heart of it all are these three brilliant tenets of campaign building that we continue to draw from and discuss at our firm:
1. A Universal Truth Can Change the Tide. As adults fixate on partisanship and politics and policy, the young people driving this movement have cast all three aside. They haven’t divided themselves into ideological camps or attempted to reach across the aisle. They’ve ignored the aisle entirely and focused on a more universal goal: that they be able to attend school and go about their lives without the fear of death hanging over them. There is nothing partisan about that frame, and it’s a message that demands unanimous resonance and consensus. It is powerful and accessible, and it doesn’t push anyone to the margins of the debate because it is centered around the basic principle of safety for our children.
2. Cut The Clutter. Indeed, while adults have bickered over the appropriate length of a background check and fretted over limiting the reach of the Second Amendment, this younger generation of Americans has made clear that only outcomes matter. They don’t care about election outcomes, or precedent, or any measure that has thus far contributed to the status quo. For them, there is only their future and what they expect for it.
These young activists managed to replace a rote narrative with one that creates pressure around results because they haven’t allowed themselves to be distracted by anything else. There is no dialogue — there is only one message seeking one answer. In their frame, the question isn’t whether you favor policy A or policy B but whether you care about young human lives enough to take action and drive change. This serves as a stark and sobering narrative that cuts through all the clutter that has stalled progress in Washington.
3. A Foil Worth Fighting For. It’s worth noting too that these young people blame ALL of us for the persisting gun problem in America. Nobody is exempt here — Republicans and Democrats alike. Their movement makes clear that adults have failed them, and we are all responsible. This foil makes inaction uncomfortable because it puts every person of voting age on blast. These students left no room for anyone to escape our collective failure to protect children’s lives because they weren’t precious about who is the enemy to progress. Everyone has blood on their hands, they say, and now the chickens have come home to roost. This powerful foil holds everyone accountable equally, but it also gives everyone an equal opportunity to rise up and meet the youth’s challenge of creating change. Sometimes creating a bigger tent for the “them” gives “us” an easier time of demanding and achieving our outcomes.
These students are right to place blame as they have and it’s on us to hear their call and get to work. RALLY is with these students every step of the way because we agree, change is long overdue and we won’t sleep until we do what’s necessary to get the outcomes our kids deserve.
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RALLY is an issue-driven communications firm that takes on sticky political and social problems and finds ways to push them forward. Felix Schein is RALLY’s President and Mackenzie Long is an Account Executive. They are both based out of Los Angeles.
