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8: Interest Groups

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    204118
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    m interest, as it pertains to interestThe deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, when a 19-year-old former student killed 14 students and three staff members. Mass shootings — usually defined as incidents involving four or more victims — happen tragically often in America, enough that most Americans are familiar with what happens in their aftermaths. First, frantic news coverage scrambles to establish the details while the shooter is still active. Then begins the somber work of numbering and naming the dead. Statements of sympathy and vows of change are issued by politicians and other public figures. After a few days of grieving, the nation quietly moves on to the next news item, while those personally affected wish they could forget what happened as easily as the rest of us can.

    Photograph of students protesting during March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.
    Students protest in favor of stricter gun control laws in Washington, D.C., during March for Our Lives in 2018.

    Parkland’s survivors were determined not to let their tragedy fade into history like so many others had. Less than a week after the shooting, they announced that a march would take place the following month in Washington, D.C. Celebrities, corporations, and advocacy organizations pledged support. Companion events were planned in all 50 states. Students made appearances on national news programs to share their experiences and publicize the protest. Over a million Americans took part in the March for Our Lives, with thousands more joining in from around the world. It was hard to imagine a more effective way of sending the message that stricter gun control laws were urgently needed to prevent further bloodshed.

    And yet, despite the protests, and despite the fact that a majority of Americans favored making it more difficult for people to obtain guns, very little changed in terms of policy. Florida tightened some of its laws regarding firearms purchases, and Congress allocated funding for increased school safety provisions such as metal detectors, but no major national gun control policies came to fruition. For many of the young people who took to the streets to demand government action to address gun violence, this outcome was a bitter disappointment.

    In Chapter 7, we examined the American people and their opinions at the individual level and the American people as a unified entity whose collective view constitutes “public opinion.” However, much of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” occurs somewhere between the individual level and the national level. To understand why March for Our Lives was so successful at drawing public attention to the issue of gun control and yet so unsuccessful at channeling that attention into government action, we must also examine the American people from a third perspective: as an assortment of groups.


    This page titled 8: Interest Groups is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Benjamin R. Kantack (Tekakwitha Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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