How Parkland Teens Hope to Swing Votes—Starting With Their Parents

Check out the latest gun control effort from these powerful student activists.

Meghan Mccarthy/Palm Beach Post via ZUMA Wire

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, students have been demanding change. Now, two juniors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are working to rally parents to support candidates who advocate for gun control. 

“In our movement, we wish for parents to make a promise to their children that they will vote for legislatures and politicians who will choose our children’s safety over guns!” reads the mission statement at the top of the Parents’ Promise to Kids website. Adam Buchwald and Zach Hibshman, the students behind the PPTK initiative, have asked adults to sign a contract that pledges to vote for candidates who “will act on common sense gun laws.”  

https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/968238879647191041

PPTK is the latest example of student-led activism in response to a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead and more than a dozen wounded on Valentine’s Day. Just days after the shooting, students rallied outside a federal courthouse to demand action against gun violence. The rally culminated in a memorable speech from Emma Gonzalez, a senior at the high school who survived the shooting. “To every politician who is taking money from the NRA: Shame on you,” she said.

Teenagers have taken to social media and written op-eds. They’ve bused to Tallahassee to meet lawmakers, including Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott, to lobby for gun control. At a recent CNN town hall, students and parents pressed Sen. Marco Rubio and other politicians, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel on what they plan to do to address gun violence in the shooting’s aftermath. They’ve even pressured corporations who have sponsorship deals with the NRA to cut ties, resulting in the end of discount programs for NRA members at companies like Delta Airlines and Hertz rental cars. 

The Stoneman Douglas students, who have dubbed their movement, “Never Again,” have inspired similar demonstrations from students across the country. Next month, the group is taking its action to Washington, DC, for what they’ve called “March for Our Lives,” an event in which they’ve drawn financial support from the likes of George and Amal Clooney and Oprah. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate