8.1: Introduction

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

The deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history occurred on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a 19-year-old former student killed 14 students and three staff members. Mass shootings happen tragically often in America, enough that most Americans are familiar with what happens in their aftermaths. First, frantic news coverage scrambles to establish what happened. Then comes the somber work of numbering and naming the dead. Politicians and other public figures issue statements of sympathy and vows of change. After a few days, the nation quietly moves on, while those personally affected wish they could forget what happened as easily as the rest of us can.

Parkland’s survivors were determined not to let their tragedy fade into history. 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 appeared on the news to share their experiences and publicize the protest. Over a million Americans took part in the March for Our Lives, with thousands joining in from around the world. It was hard to imagine a more impactful message that stricter gun control laws were urgently needed to prevent further bloodshed.

And yet, despite the protests, and despite the fact that most Americans favored making it harder for people to obtain guns, little changed in terms of policy. Florida did tighten some 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 people who took to the streets to demand government action, this outcome was a bitter disappointment.

In Chapter 7, we examined the American people and their opinions, both at the individual level and 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 an issue yet so unsuccessful at channeling that attention into major policy change, we must also examine the American people from a third perspective: as an assortment of groups.