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Here’s What It’s Like At The Headquarters Of The Teens Working To Stop Mass Shootings

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Just days after surviving a mass shooting, a team of teens are trying to start a revolution from their parents’ living rooms.

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Florida student to NRA and Trump: 'We call BS'

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Can Students Protest During School? What Supreme Court Said

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Students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”

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ACLU-Schools and Discipline for Student Protest

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ACLU-Schools and Discipline for Student Protest

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Students around the country are turning the heartbreaking school shooting in Parkland, Florida, into an inspiring and exemplary push for legislative change. In the last few days, many people have asked whether schools can discipline students for speaking out. The short answer? It depends on when, where, and how the students decide to express themselves.

Plans for coordinated student walkouts have been making national news and have already engendered disciplinary threats from some school administrators. Since the law in virtually all jurisdictions requires students to go to school, schools can typically discipline students for missing class, even if they're doing so to participate in a protest or otherwise express themselves. But what the school can'tdo is discipline students more harshly because they are walking out to express a political view or because school administrators don't support the views behind the protest. In other words, any disciplinary action for walking out cannot be a response to the content of the protest.

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Before deciding whether to join a political walkout, students might want to find out what policies govern discipline for absences in their state, school district, and their particular school so that they're aware of the potential consequences. They should also know that in addition to walkouts, there are actions they can take for which schools cannot legally impose punishment.

We hope schools recognize that even when they are within their right to discipline students for protests, that doesn't always mean they should.

For example, during school hours, students cannot be punished for speaking out unless their speech disrupts the functioning of the school. This is because - as the Supreme Court recognized in a 1969 decision upholding the right of Mary Beth Tinker to wear an armband to school in protest of the Vietnam War - students do not lose their constitutional rights "at the schoolhouse gate." This makes sense given the educational purpose of our school system. As the court held in an earlier decision finding that students cannot be obligated to salute the flag, students' speech rights must be "scrupulously" protected if we are to have any hope of "educating the young for citizenship" and teaching students not to "discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes."

While what qualifies as "disruptive" will vary by context, courts have typically held that students have the right to wear expressive clothing that doesn't target fellow students or disrupt class. In addition to Tinker, the ACLU has successfully represented students asserting their rights to wear clothing expressing anti-abortion views, support for the LGBT community, and even opposition to the ACLU itself.

Outside of school, students enjoy essentially the same rights to protest and speak out as anyone else. This means that students are likely to be most protected if they organize, protest, and advocate off campus and outside of school hours. Some schools have attempted to extend their power to punish students even for off-campus, online expression. While courts have differed on the constitutionality of such punishments, the ACLU has challenged such overreach.
Student Resources
We clearly have a lot to learn from the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and their peers nationwide. Their activism inspires confidence in the future of our democracy, and their schools should be proud of them. We hope those schools recognize that even when they are within their right to discipline students for protests, that doesn't always mean they should.

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Can Schools Discipline Students for Protesting? | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

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Students around the country are turning the heartbreaking school shooting in Parkland, Florida, into an inspiring and exemplary push for legislative change. In the last few days, many people have asked whether schools can discipline students for speaking out. The short answer? It depends on when, where, and how the students decide to express themselves.

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How to Talk to Children and Gun Violence and Schools

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How to Talk to Children and Gun Violence and Schools

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Talking with Children about Gun Violence

The issue of gun violence and mass shootings is in the news frequently. Young people are usually aware of what is happening and will want to talk about it. However, it is a sensitive, scary, and potentially painful topic. Before raising the matter with young people, consider your child's personality. To what extent will the conversation ease your child's fears or add to it? How does that influence what you say and how you say it?

For some young people, it is more effective to be proactive and raise the topic without their prompting. For others, following their lead and their questions is a better approach. When you discuss this topic with young people, here are some things to keep in mind:

Be prepared yourself so you can be there for them emotionally. Make sure you have set aside enough time to hear children's thoughts, questions, and feelings.

Reassure them that the adults in their lives are there to help keep them safe. Provide accurate information about their school's safety procedures and information about the ways in which they can remain safe.

Be careful when describing the perpetrator. Do not stereotype and make assumptions about the person. Mental health is an example. One in four adults experience mental health issues annually. The majority of people with these issues are not violent.

Emphasize the helpers, including those who took care of and helped the victims. It is helpful to convey to children your concern and compassion. You can then think together with them about something you can do to help.

Mass Shootings in May 2022

On May 24, 2022, a gunman, armed with multiple weapons and wearing body armor, entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and killed 19 children and two teachers. He also shot his grandmother before crashing a vehicle near the school. The accused gunman is identified as Salvador Ramos; he was an 18-year-old who attended a nearby high school. He was shot by a police officer called to the shooting. The shooting at Robb Elementary is the second-deadliest shooting at an elementary, middle or high school on record in the U.S.

Just ten days earlier on May 14, 2022, a white supremacist extremist gunman entered the Tops grocery store in a largely Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York and shot thirteen people, killing ten and injuring at least three others. Almost all of the victims are Black. The gunman was identified by law enforcement as eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who allegedly drove more than 200 miles to engage in this attack, one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent U.S history. He was armed with an assault weapon and wore body armor. An anti-Black racial slur can be seen on his gun, which was captured on video by his live streaming of the attack. The accused gunman, identified as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron, was taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder.

Shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan

On November 30, 2021, a fifteen-year-old high school student brought a semi-automatic handgun to his high school, Oxford High School in Oxford Township, MI, and opened fire on other students, killing four students and injuring seven other people, including one teacher. The suspected shooter was charged as an adult with two dozen crimes, including murder, attempted murder and terrorism causing death. The county prosecutor charged the parents of the accused teenager with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, saying they failed to intervene to prevent the tragedy and allowed their son to have access to the gun he used during the shooting.

Eight People in Atlanta area shot, most of whom were Asian women

On March 16, 2021, a gunman went on a shooting rampage at three spas in the Atlanta, GA area, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The alleged shooter was charged with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks. The murder took place amid an alarming spike in anti-Asian incidents, harassment, attacks and violence.

Mass shootings and their impact: El Paso, Texas

On August 3, 2019, an active shooter opened fire at a Walmart store in a shopping center in El Paso, Texas. Twenty-two people were killed, and dozens were injured. This shooting is considered one of the deadliest in the history of Texas. Law enforcement confirmed the shooter wrote a four-page manifesto that embraces white supremacist and anti-immigrant views. Police disclosed that the suspect admitted he was targeting Mexican people.

Less than 24 hours after the El Paso murder, another deadly shooting took place outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. At least nine people were killed and sixteen people were injured. The alleged gunman was shot dead by the police.

Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting

On October 27, 2018, a gunman, identified as Robert Bowers, armed with an assault rifle and several handguns, entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and yelled, "All Jews Must Die" as he opened fire. Described as the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in the U.S., eleven congregants were killed; four police officers and two others were wounded.

Shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Florida

On February 14, 2018, seventeen people--including students and adults-were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was a nineteen-year-old former student of the school. Authorities reported that he was armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle and countless magazines. People were killed both inside and outside the school. The Parkland shooting is among the ten deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history.

Other mass shootings

In recent years, there have been a variety of mass shootings. On October 1, 2017, a gunman at a Las Vegas hotel fired a barrage of gunfire into a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, resulting in the killing of 59 people and injuring hundreds of others.

On June 12, 2016, a gunman named Omar Mateen, an American-born man, pledged his allegiance to ISIS. He then went into a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL and shot and killed 49 people and injured 53 others.

On December 2, 2015, two assailants opened fire at a center for people with disabilities in San Bernadino, California; 14 people were killed and 21 others were wounded.

That deadly mass shooting came on the heels of another tragic event on November 27, 2015, in which Robert Lewis Dear embarked upon a deadly shooting spree at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Two people and a police officer were killed and nine others were wounded.

On October 1, 2015, a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon left nine students dead and another nine injured. The gunman, Christopher Harper-Mercer, killed himself after an exchange of gunfire with the police.

What can be done about gun violence?

Mass shootings often raise a lot of feelings that range from sadness and heartbreak to anger and frustration. They also usually lead to a public conversation about gun laws and what our government can and should do. In 2012 after the mass shooting of twenty young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, President Obama proposed legislation to overhaul gun laws. The proposals included universal background checks, new and expanded assault weapon and high-capacity magazine bans and other measures to prevent mass shootings. Several months later, it failed to pass the Senate.

What are mass shootings?

Understanding mass shootings, typically defined as the murder of four or more people, school shootings and other gun-related deaths, is complex. According to a Congressional Research Service in 2013, there had been 78 mass murders carried out with guns during the thirty-year period of 1982-2012. Because there is not one standard way to tally the number of mass school shootings, in the period between 2000 and 2013, the FBI identified 160 active shooter incidents, where one or more shooters were actively engaged in killing or attempted killing in a confined and populated location. It used this definition to describe instances like Sandy Hook or the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. Since 2011, the rate of mass shootings has tripled.

The second amendment

Defenders of gun rights say that proposed gun regulations violate the Second Amendment. The second amendment states: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." After the Newtown shooting, the president of the National Rifle Association, (NRA) a national nonprofit organization that advocates and lobbies for gun rights, spoke about the incident. He said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Indeed, many people believe that guns prevent crime from happening.

Gun violence in the U.S.

In addition to mass shootings, there are other relevant numbers about gun violence in the states. More than 32,000 people per year are killed by guns-which translates to approximately 88 gun deaths per day. Compared to peer nations, including Germany, England and Canada, people are much more likely to die from guns in the U.S. than in other countries.

According to the Pew Research Center's 2021 opinion poll on Americans and guns, almost half of Americans (48%) see gun violence as a very big problem in our country today. In addition, the percentage of the public who agree that we should:

Prevent people who are mentally ill from purchasing guns: 87%

Make private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks: 81%

Create a federal database to track gun sales: 66%

Ban high-capacity ammunition magazines: 64%

Ban assault-style weapons: 63%

When mass shootings occur, people frequently search for the reason and often mental illness is cited as the culprit. It is much more complicated than that; it is difficult to come up with one reason or risk factor. There are usually a multitude of reasons for these shootings including but not limited to: domestic terrorism, availability of guns, romanticism with violence and multiple risk factors operating simultaneously (e.g., depression, narcissism, alienation, lack of trust, poor coping skills, fascination with violence-filled entertainment, revenge fantasies, attempted suicide attempts in the past, etc.).

Age

12 and up

Questions to Start the Conversation

How do you feel about what you know and have heard about gun violence and mass shootings? What else do you want to know?

Do you know people who have different opinions on gun violence? What do they say and how does this influence (or not) your point of view?

What do you think should be done to keep people safe from gun violence?

Why do you think so many people feel it is important to protect people's right to own guns?

Why do you think there are so many more mass shootings than there used to be?

Questions to Dig Deeper

What can we do "to get our government to do something about gun violence" as President Obama urged after the 2015 school shooting in Oregon?

How is the NRA successful in making their case that guns should not be regulated more than they already are?

Why do you think that Congress has not been able to pass the legislation to try to prevent mass shootings?

Ideas for Taking Action

Ask: What can we do to help? What actions might make a difference?

Write a letter to your members of Congress (or to the school or local newspaper) that conveys your position about gun violence and what you think should be done about it.

Educate others about this topic by sharing information on social media, engaging in personal conversations or organizing an educational forum or debate in school.

Join with or hold a fundraiser to support gun violence prevention advocacy organizations such as Newtown Action Alliance, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand.

Additional Resources

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The issue of gun violence and mass shootings is in the news frequently. Young people are usually aware of what is happening and will want to talk about it. However, it is a sensitive, scary, and potentially painful topic. Before raising the matter with young people, consider your child's personality.

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Skip to main content

Sisters Lauren and Victoria had never been activists before, but the bullying they witnessed online-and the terrible consequences their peers suffered-inspired them to act.

Enough is Enough

Despite the intense pain of losing a classmate to a violent crime, these Staley High School students refused to let fear and hatred dominate the memory of their friend.

Meet the founding troop leaders of the Radical Brownies, a group for girls of color focused on social justice, community activism and embracing all aspects of their identities. ( Note: Since this documentary was filmed, the Radical Brownies have changed their name to the Radical Monarchs!)

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Online Exclusive Video Feature: Youth United!

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Skip to main content Sisters Lauren and Victoria had never been activists before, but the bullying they witnessed online-and the terrible consequences their peers suffered-inspired them to act. Despite the intense pain of losing a classmate to a violent crime, these Staley High School students refused to let fear and hatred dominate the memory of their friend.

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Editor's note, May 26, 2022: This story was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2021; the statistics included may not be the most recent available. For Vox's latest coverage of America's gun violence epidemic, see our explainer.
In the aftermath of mass shootings, Americans are forced to confront the country's unique relationship with guns.

America is certainly an exceptional country when it comes to firearms. It's one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the relationship is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal - in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms.

These maps and charts show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it's such a tough problem to fix.

1) America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany

This chart, compiled using 2012 United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for the Guardian, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.

2) America has more guns than people

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world's privately held firearms, based on 2018 data from the Small Arms Survey.

3) There have been more than 2,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook

In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been more than 2,500 mass shootings as of July 2020.

The number comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which hosts a database that has tracked mass shootings since 2013. But since some shootings go unreported, the database is likely missing some, as well as the details of some of the events.

The tracker uses a fairly broad definition of "mass shooting": It includes not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all (excluding the shooter).

Even under this broad definition, it's worth noting that mass shootings make up less than 2 percent of America's firearm deaths, which totaled nearly 40,000 in 2017 alone.

4) On average, there is around one mass shooting for each day in America

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, supporters of gun rights often argue that it's inappropriate to bring up political debates about gun control in the aftermath of a tragedy.

But if this argument is followed to its logical end, then it will just about never be the right time to discuss gun control, as Christopher Ingraham pointed out at the Washington Post in 2015. Under the broader definition of mass shootings, America has around one mass shooting a day. So if lawmakers are forced to wait for a time when there isn't a mass shooting to talk gun control, they could find themselves waiting for a very long time.

5) States with more guns have more gun deaths

Using data from a 2016 study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths, including homicides and suicides. This has been found across the empirical research: "Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

Read more in Mother Jones's "10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down."

6) It's not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths

7) America is an outlier when it comes to gun deaths, but not overall crime

It would be one thing if the US happened to have more crime than other nations, but the existing data shows that not to be the case. America is only an outlier when it comes to homicides and, specifically, gun violence, based on 2000 data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University.

As Zack Beauchamp explained for Vox, a breakthrough analysis in the 1990s by UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence - and that's driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," Zimring and Hawkins wrote. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it's much more likely that someone will get angry during an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

8) States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths

When economist Richard Florida took a look at gun deaths and other social indicators in 2011, he found that higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness didn't correlate with more gun deaths. But he did find one telling correlation: States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. (Read more in Florida's "The Geography of Gun Deaths.")

This is backed by other research: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence - a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

9) Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple of decades

The good news is that firearm homicides, like all homicides and crime, have declined over the past several decades.

There's still a lot of debate among criminal justice experts about why this crime drop is occurring. Some of the most credible ideas include mass incarceration, more and better policing, and reduced lead exposure from gasoline. But one theory that researchers have widely debunked is the idea that more guns have deterred crime - in fact, the opposite may be true, based on research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Center.

10) Most gun deaths are suicides

Although America's political debate about guns tends to focus on grisly mass shootings and murders, a majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, this is actually one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns: There is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

11) The states with the most guns report the most suicides

12) Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily

Perhaps the key reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously explained that this is why reducing access to guns can be so important to preventing suicides: Just stalling an attempt or making it less likely to result in death makes a huge difference.

"Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person," Harkavy-Friedman said. "First, the crisis won't last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That's why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful."

She added, "[I]f we keep the method of suicide away from a person when they consider it, in that moment they will not switch to another method. It doesn't mean they never will. But in that moment, their thinking is very inflexible and rigid. So it's not like they say, 'Oh, this isn't going to work. I'm going to try something else.' They generally can't adjust their thinking, and they don't switch methods."

13) Policies that limit access to guns have decreased suicides

When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides. The data above, taken from a 2010 study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a mandatory gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.

The Australian study found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant (in large part because murders in Australia were already so low). But the drop in suicides definitely was - and the results are striking.

Australia is far from alone in these types of results. A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent when the military stopped letting soldiers take their guns home. The change was most pronounced during the weekends.

This data and research have a clear message: States and countries can significantly reduce the number of suicides by restricting access to guns.

14) In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

Given that states with more guns tend to have more homicides, it isn't too surprising that, as a 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health found, states with more guns also have more police die in the line of duty.

Researchers looked at federal data for firearm ownership and homicides of police officers across the US over 15 years. They found that states with more gun ownership had more police killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.

The findings could help explain why US police officers appear to kill more people than police in other developed countries. For US police officers, the higher rates of guns and gun violence - even against them - in America mean that they not only will encounter more guns and violence, but they can expect to encounter more guns and deadly violence, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.

15) Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early 2000s

Over the past two decades, Americans have shifted from mostly supporting the concept of gun control to greater support for protecting "the right of Americans to own guns," according to a 2017 Pew Research Center analysis of its surveys. This shift has happened even as major mass shootings, such as the attacks on Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, have received more press attention.

16) Specific gun control policies are fairly popular

Although most Americans say they want to protect the right to own firearms, most also back many gun control proposals - such as stronger background checks, a database to track gun sales, and bans on assault-style weapons, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

This type of contradiction isn't exclusive to gun policy issues. For example, although most Americans in the past said they don't like Obamacare, most of them also said they like the specific policies in the health care law. Americans just don't like some policy ideas until you get specific.

For people who believe the empirical evidence that more guns mean more violence, this contradiction is the source of a lot of frustration. Americans by and large support policies that reduce access to guns. But once these policies are proposed, they're broadly spun by politicians and pundits into attempts to "take away your guns." So nothing gets done, and preventable deaths keep occurring.

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America's unique gun violence problem, explained in 16 maps and charts

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Editor's note, May 26, 2022: This story was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2021; the statistics included may not be the most recent available. For Vox's latest coverage of America's gun violence epidemic, see our explainer . In the aftermath of mass shootings, Americans are forced to confront the country's unique relationship with guns.

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What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns

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They weren’t the first mass-shooting victims the Florida radiologist saw—but their wounds were radically different.

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With 35 years of classroom experience, Kelly Gallagher is a leading voice in literacy education. A former high school English teacher, he is a respected author, speaker, and instructional coach known for his practical, research-informed approaches to reading and writing instruction.

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Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

After a horrific shooting that left 17 dead, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is set to reopen at the end of the week. But when it does, 18-year-old Sofie Whitney, a senior, will not be in attendance. As she told BuzzFeed News from the living-room floor, where she and a handful of other students have assembled a makeshift war room, she does not want to return to school "until the federal government starts making some progress" on gun control. Asked how her parents would feel about this decision, she replied, "I haven't really discussed this with my parents, but I'll deal with them."

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the teenage survivors have taken it upon themselves to spearhead an impassioned push for gun control, at a time when it would have been easy and completely understandable for them to grieve in private. Instead, just hours after the massacre, 17-year-old David Hogg addressed lawmakers directly on CNN. "Please . . . We're children. You guys are the adults," he said. "Take some action . . . work together, come over your politics, and get something done." Three days later, Hogg's classmate, senior Emma González, delivered a fiery speech at a Fort Lauderdale rally condemning the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. "The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us," González said. "And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S." Both appearances quickly went viral, creating a feedback loop that Stoneman students have readily fueled, giving dozens of interviews and making countless press appearances in a matter of days. And against all odds, they're getting results where so many others have failed.

"One of the reasons I think the survivors' voices are carrying so far is that they are, deservedly, just absolutely alight with anger at the fucked-up American calculus that meant their friends' lives were deemed less important than continued access to assault rifles," Laura Olin, who launched the Clinton campaign's digital strategy and worked on the digital team for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, told me. "The fact that they simply can't believe that we could have allowed this to happen-that the adults could have failed them so badly-has also helped wake the rest of us up from our usual sadness-rage-despair cycle after mass shootings. It's made change feel possible for the first time in a long time."

Their efforts have proven effective in part because they have an innate understanding of the social-media ecosystem. Digital natives armed with smartphones, they found it second nature to capture, in graphic detail, their own reactions and conversations with loved ones during the shooting, as well as after the fact. They're well versed in disseminating their message on social media in real time, using platforms they're already familiar with. Unlike survivors of Columbine, who came of age well before the smartphone era, or Sandy Hook, who were too young to speak out, Stoneman students have the means and the skills to share their message autonomously-no institutional gatekeepers required. "Two things that tend to spread on social media are anger and hope," Olin said. "And these kids are helping to bring both to the gun debate."

In recent days, Stoneman students have commandeered Twitter to spread their demands for gun control, where they've been critical of politicians like Trump and immediately responsive to attacks from the right. When Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative from Georgia, insinuated on Twitter that high-school students in Parkland were only organizing with the help of billionaire donor George Soros, the students themselves were quick to fire back. "Hey Jack!" Parkland student Sarah Chadwick tweeted. "Just wanted to let you know that, yes! Us 17yrs really are planning a nationwide rally! It's crazy what determination, and a strong work ethic can lead to! But I mean you have neither of those things so I wouldn't expect you to understand."

For media experts following from the sidelines, there are echoes of the Arab Spring. "I think what makes Parkland different is the same thing that made the Egyptian uprising different from previous revolutions-that we could, and can hear directly from those involved, on the ground, without the mediation (and accompanying bias) of journalists," Jillian York, a journalist and the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. "We're hearing directly from children who experienced the shooting, and survived it. Their perspectives are raw, and real-more so than anything we would hear through the filters of journalism and adulthood." What the Parkland students have accomplished in such a short time in some ways reflects the utopian vision of Silicon Valley: bringing people together to create positive change, and coalescing groups with different voices around one movement.

The Stoneman student campaign also highlights how the feedback loop between social media and broadcast television can be hijacked, using one to drive the other. Their tweets have been picked up and broadcast on outlets like CNN and Fox News, after which they're regularly booked to speak on these channels themselves. An innate ability to think in 280 characters, to deliver headline-worthy sound bites, and to counter-program adversarial media, has combined to amplify their message in a way that Obama, in the wake of Sandy Hook, was unable to do with hours of primetime coverage. Their self-styled war room comes complete with whiteboards and calendars to schedule press appearances and rallies. As Whitney told BuzzFeed, "You can't just make change. You have to be organized."

Right now, their calendar includes a trip to Tallahassee, where more than 100 Stoneman students traveled for a Tuesday meeting with state legislators to discuss changes to existing gun laws. A group of students will appear at a CNN town hall with lawmakers on Wednesday, and a core group will headline " March for Our Lives," a nationwide demonstration on March 24 where marchers will demand that a comprehensive bill be brought before Congress to address the gun-violence epidemic. For them, it's perhaps a stroke of good luck that the president is consistently glued to the television: over Presidents' Day weekend, Trump reportedly wandered the halls of Mar-a-Lago, agonizing over the gun-control debate and telling guests that he was "closely monitoring the media appearances by some of the surviving students." As Stoneman student Alex Wind told CNN on Monday, "I know he's listening." And if he doesn't take action, the Stoneman students will pop up in the wake of the next shooting, and the next, and the next, gaming the system to their advantage until something gives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Anger and Hope": Why the Parkland Survivors Are Winning the Social-Media War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

After a horrific shooting that left 17 dead, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is set to reopen at the end of the week. But when it does, 18-year-old Sofie Whitney, a senior, will not be in attendance. As she told BuzzFeed News from the living-room floor, where she and a handful of other students have assembled a makeshift war room, she does not want to return to school "until the federal government starts making some progress" on gun control. Asked how her parents would feel about this decision, she replied, "I haven't really discussed this with my parents, but I'll deal with them."

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the teenage survivors have taken it upon themselves to spearhead an impassioned push for gun control, at a time when it would have been easy and completely understandable for them to grieve in private. Instead, just hours after the massacre, 17-year-old David Hogg addressed lawmakers directly on CNN. "Please . . . We're children. You guys are the adults," he said. "Take some action . . . work together, come over your politics, and get something done." Three days later, Hogg's classmate, senior Emma González, delivered a fiery speech at a Fort Lauderdale rally condemning the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. "The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us," González said. "And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S." Both appearances quickly went viral, creating a feedback loop that Stoneman students have readily fueled, giving dozens of interviews and making countless press appearances in a matter of days. And against all odds, they're getting results where so many others have failed.

"One of the reasons I think the survivors' voices are carrying so far is that they are, deservedly, just absolutely alight with anger at the fucked-up American calculus that meant their friends' lives were deemed less important than continued access to assault rifles," Laura Olin, who launched the Clinton campaign's digital strategy and worked on the digital team for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, told me. "The fact that they simply can't believe that we could have allowed this to happen-that the adults could have failed them so badly-has also helped wake the rest of us up from our usual sadness-rage-despair cycle after mass shootings. It's made change feel possible for the first time in a long time."

Their efforts have proven effective in part because they have an innate understanding of the social-media ecosystem. Digital natives armed with smartphones, they found it second nature to capture, in graphic detail, their own reactions and conversations with loved ones during the shooting, as well as after the fact. They're well versed in disseminating their message on social media in real time, using platforms they're already familiar with. Unlike survivors of Columbine, who came of age well before the smartphone era, or Sandy Hook, who were too young to speak out, Stoneman students have the means and the skills to share their message autonomously-no institutional gatekeepers required. "Two things that tend to spread on social media are anger and hope," Olin said. "And these kids are helping to bring both to the gun debate."

In recent days, Stoneman students have commandeered Twitter to spread their demands for gun control, where they've been critical of politicians like Trump and immediately responsive to attacks from the right. When Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative from Georgia, insinuated on Twitter that high-school students in Parkland were only organizing with the help of billionaire donor George Soros, the students themselves were quick to fire back. "Hey Jack!" Parkland student Sarah Chadwick tweeted. "Just wanted to let you know that, yes! Us 17yrs really are planning a nationwide rally! It's crazy what determination, and a strong work ethic can lead to! But I mean you have neither of those things so I wouldn't expect you to understand."

For media experts following from the sidelines, there are echoes of the Arab Spring. "I think what makes Parkland different is the same thing that made the Egyptian uprising different from previous revolutions-that we could, and can hear directly from those involved, on the ground, without the mediation (and accompanying bias) of journalists," Jillian York, a journalist and the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. "We're hearing directly from children who experienced the shooting, and survived it. Their perspectives are raw, and real-more so than anything we would hear through the filters of journalism and adulthood." What the Parkland students have accomplished in such a short time in some ways reflects the utopian vision of Silicon Valley: bringing people together to create positive change, and coalescing groups with different voices around one movement.

The Stoneman student campaign also highlights how the feedback loop between social media and broadcast television can be hijacked, using one to drive the other. Their tweets have been picked up and broadcast on outlets like CNN and Fox News, after which they're regularly booked to speak on these channels themselves. An innate ability to think in 280 characters, to deliver headline-worthy sound bites, and to counter-program adversarial media, has combined to amplify their message in a way that Obama, in the wake of Sandy Hook, was unable to do with hours of primetime coverage. Their self-styled war room comes complete with whiteboards and calendars to schedule press appearances and rallies. As Whitney told BuzzFeed, "You can't just make change. You have to be organized."

Right now, their calendar includes a trip to Tallahassee, where more than 100 Stoneman students traveled for a Tuesday meeting with state legislators to discuss changes to existing gun laws. A group of students will appear at a CNN town hall with lawmakers on Wednesday, and a core group will headline " March for Our Lives," a nationwide demonstration on March 24 where marchers will demand that a comprehensive bill be brought before Congress to address the gun-violence epidemic. For them, it's perhaps a stroke of good luck that the president is consistently glued to the television: over Presidents' Day weekend, Trump reportedly wandered the halls of Mar-a-Lago, agonizing over the gun-control debate and telling guests that he was "closely monitoring the media appearances by some of the surviving students." As Stoneman student Alex Wind told CNN on Monday, "I know he's listening." And if he doesn't take action, the Stoneman students will pop up in the wake of the next shooting, and the next, and the next, gaming the system to their advantage until something gives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Anger and Hope": Why the Parkland Survivors Are Winning the Social-Media War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

After a horrific shooting that left 17 dead, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is set to reopen at the end of the week. But when it does, 18-year-old Sofie Whitney, a senior, will not be in attendance. As she told BuzzFeed News from the living-room floor, where she and a handful of other students have assembled a makeshift war room, she does not want to return to school "until the federal government starts making some progress" on gun control. Asked how her parents would feel about this decision, she replied, "I haven't really discussed this with my parents, but I'll deal with them."

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the teenage survivors have taken it upon themselves to spearhead an impassioned push for gun control, at a time when it would have been easy and completely understandable for them to grieve in private. Instead, just hours after the massacre, 17-year-old David Hogg addressed lawmakers directly on CNN. "Please . . . We're children. You guys are the adults," he said. "Take some action . . . work together, come over your politics, and get something done." Three days later, Hogg's classmate, senior Emma González, delivered a fiery speech at a Fort Lauderdale rally condemning the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. "The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us," González said. "And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S." Both appearances quickly went viral, creating a feedback loop that Stoneman students have readily fueled, giving dozens of interviews and making countless press appearances in a matter of days. And against all odds, they're getting results where so many others have failed.

"One of the reasons I think the survivors' voices are carrying so far is that they are, deservedly, just absolutely alight with anger at the fucked-up American calculus that meant their friends' lives were deemed less important than continued access to assault rifles," Laura Olin, who launched the Clinton campaign's digital strategy and worked on the digital team for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, told me. "The fact that they simply can't believe that we could have allowed this to happen-that the adults could have failed them so badly-has also helped wake the rest of us up from our usual sadness-rage-despair cycle after mass shootings. It's made change feel possible for the first time in a long time."

Their efforts have proven effective in part because they have an innate understanding of the social-media ecosystem. Digital natives armed with smartphones, they found it second nature to capture, in graphic detail, their own reactions and conversations with loved ones during the shooting, as well as after the fact. They're well versed in disseminating their message on social media in real time, using platforms they're already familiar with. Unlike survivors of Columbine, who came of age well before the smartphone era, or Sandy Hook, who were too young to speak out, Stoneman students have the means and the skills to share their message autonomously-no institutional gatekeepers required. "Two things that tend to spread on social media are anger and hope," Olin said. "And these kids are helping to bring both to the gun debate."

In recent days, Stoneman students have commandeered Twitter to spread their demands for gun control, where they've been critical of politicians like Trump and immediately responsive to attacks from the right. When Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative from Georgia, insinuated on Twitter that high-school students in Parkland were only organizing with the help of billionaire donor George Soros, the students themselves were quick to fire back. "Hey Jack!" Parkland student Sarah Chadwick tweeted. "Just wanted to let you know that, yes! Us 17yrs really are planning a nationwide rally! It's crazy what determination, and a strong work ethic can lead to! But I mean you have neither of those things so I wouldn't expect you to understand."

For media experts following from the sidelines, there are echoes of the Arab Spring. "I think what makes Parkland different is the same thing that made the Egyptian uprising different from previous revolutions-that we could, and can hear directly from those involved, on the ground, without the mediation (and accompanying bias) of journalists," Jillian York, a journalist and the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. "We're hearing directly from children who experienced the shooting, and survived it. Their perspectives are raw, and real-more so than anything we would hear through the filters of journalism and adulthood." What the Parkland students have accomplished in such a short time in some ways reflects the utopian vision of Silicon Valley: bringing people together to create positive change, and coalescing groups with different voices around one movement.

The Stoneman student campaign also highlights how the feedback loop between social media and broadcast television can be hijacked, using one to drive the other. Their tweets have been picked up and broadcast on outlets like CNN and Fox News, after which they're regularly booked to speak on these channels themselves. An innate ability to think in 280 characters, to deliver headline-worthy sound bites, and to counter-program adversarial media, has combined to amplify their message in a way that Obama, in the wake of Sandy Hook, was unable to do with hours of primetime coverage. Their self-styled war room comes complete with whiteboards and calendars to schedule press appearances and rallies. As Whitney told BuzzFeed, "You can't just make change. You have to be organized."

Right now, their calendar includes a trip to Tallahassee, where more than 100 Stoneman students traveled for a Tuesday meeting with state legislators to discuss changes to existing gun laws. A group of students will appear at a CNN town hall with lawmakers on Wednesday, and a core group will headline " March for Our Lives," a nationwide demonstration on March 24 where marchers will demand that a comprehensive bill be brought before Congress to address the gun-violence epidemic. For them, it's perhaps a stroke of good luck that the president is consistently glued to the television: over Presidents' Day weekend, Trump reportedly wandered the halls of Mar-a-Lago, agonizing over the gun-control debate and telling guests that he was "closely monitoring the media appearances by some of the surviving students." As Stoneman student Alex Wind told CNN on Monday, "I know he's listening." And if he doesn't take action, the Stoneman students will pop up in the wake of the next shooting, and the next, and the next, gaming the system to their advantage until something gives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Anger and Hope": Why the Parkland Survivors Are Winning the Social-Media War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Parkland students, born in the early to mid-2000s, intuitively understand how to deploy social media against politicians to demand action on gun violence-and it seems to be working.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Schools threaten to punish students who join walkouts over gun control | CNN

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Students around the country are walking out of class to demand tougher gun laws in response to last week’s deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but some may face disciplinary measures.

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Pulse Nightclub Survivors Joining Parkland

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Pulse Nightclub Survivors Joining Parkland

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Pulse Nightclub Survivors Joined Parkland Students to Rally for Gun Control

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“Y’all got this. Y’all strong. Make sure your voices are heard.”

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

CommonLit is a nonprofit that has everything teachers and schools need for top-notch literacy instruction: a full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and formative data.

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CommonLit | The Sit-In Movement by USHistory.org | CommonLit

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. CommonLit is a nonprofit that has everything teachers and schools need for top-notch literacy instruction: a full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and formative data.

# data[].attributes.headline
Teaching Tolerance-What you Can Do to Support Students

# data[].attributes.subject
Teaching Tolerance-What you Can Do to Support Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Walkouts, Marches and the Desire to ‘Do Something’: What You Need to Know About Stoneman Douglas Activism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, courageous survivors have inspired a groundswell of activism and advocacy. Here’s what you need to know—and what you can do, no matter your situation.

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Video-Mary Beth Tinker on First Amendment

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Video-Mary Beth Tinker on First Amendment

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Earlier this week, we remembered the work of two men from Atlanta. One who has passed, and one who still leads the fight.

John Lewis's March trilogy soared to the top of bestselling lists everywhere, and the third volume received the National Book Award in 2016. With great reason: Lewis is an icon for our age. Unafraid of baseless criticism. A leader, a hopeful warrior, tireless in his efforts to bring equality to our country's imbalance. He is a hero.

"There comes a time when you have to say something, when you have to make a little noise, when you have to move your feet," Lewis said on the House Floor in June of 2016. "And this is the time. Now is the time to get in the way. The time to act is now. We will be silent no more."

At All the Wonders, we believe that activism can begin at any age. In honor of Mr. Lewis and his charge to make a little noise and move your feet, here is a collection of books for young activists. It is time to pursue social justice, readers! May you use these #booksforbetter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Fern Hallman, Collection Development Librarian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier this week, we remembered the work of two men from Atlanta. One who has passed, and one who still leads the fight. John Lewis's March trilogy soared to the top of bestselling lists everywhere, and the third volume received the National Book Award in 2016.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Earlier this week, we remembered the work of two men from Atlanta. One who has passed, and one who still leads the fight.

John Lewis's March trilogy soared to the top of bestselling lists everywhere, and the third volume received the National Book Award in 2016. With great reason: Lewis is an icon for our age. Unafraid of baseless criticism. A leader, a hopeful warrior, tireless in his efforts to bring equality to our country's imbalance. He is a hero.

"There comes a time when you have to say something, when you have to make a little noise, when you have to move your feet," Lewis said on the House Floor in June of 2016. "And this is the time. Now is the time to get in the way. The time to act is now. We will be silent no more."

At All the Wonders, we believe that activism can begin at any age. In honor of Mr. Lewis and his charge to make a little noise and move your feet, here is a collection of books for young activists. It is time to pursue social justice, readers! May you use these #booksforbetter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Fern Hallman, Collection Development Librarian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier this week, we remembered the work of two men from Atlanta. One who has passed, and one who still leads the fight. John Lewis's March trilogy soared to the top of bestselling lists everywhere, and the third volume received the National Book Award in 2016.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabeth Graeber for NPR

Social activist Innosanto Nagara wanted to find a fun book to read to his 2-year-old son that also talked about the importance of social justice.

He wasn't looking for the typical fiction written for children. Instead, he was looking for unique narratives - by writers of color and/or authors who can speak about social issues through their own experiences.

Nagara couldn't find any. So he wrote one.

"Parents and teachers are realizing that what students read and learn affects how they see the world." said Deborah Menkart, Executive Director for Teaching for Change, an organization that puts together social justice reading lists to inspire children throughout the summer.

"Give kids credit," says Stan Yogi, one of the authors on our list. "They have an innate sense of what's right and what's wrong. Being able to draw on that innate sense of justice through relatable stories is so important."

Not all parents have the time to do what Innosanto Nagara did.

For those who can't, we've compiled a list - with help from Teaching for Change - of books that frame big issues through a lens children can understand.

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Looking for books to feed your child's curiosity and ignite the social activist inside of them? Here's our list of children's books to keep your child occupied all summer long.

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Books about Activism and Protest for Children

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Books about Activism and Protest for Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a politically charged time to be alive in the US. Yesterday's Women's March brought out incredible numbers of people in cities and towns around the world who exercised what we consider a fundamental right in America. Maybe you had your young children with you, like I did. I realized while we were marching in a local protest that activism can be a hard thing to define to young kids. Keep the conversation going with these books that help explain and demonstrate what it's all about.

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. The crayons are fed up, and they're going to let Duncan know exactly why. Show kids the power of letter writing, how a strike can help you fight for your rights, and the power of listening when you're in charge.

Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin. The barnyard animals start with a politely typed request to the farmer, but when he ignores them, they take peaceful and hilarious action. Never cross a cow with a typewriter.

A Is For Activist by Innosanto Nagara. An absolutely gorgeous alphabet book teaching some of the basics of social justice, too.

by Nikki Giovanni. This book is gorgeous, and packed with information about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. The text of her story may work better for kids in maybe 2nd grade and up, but the amazing Bryan Collier's illustrations (honestly, we are not worthy) and essence of what Ms. Parks's protest was about can come through for any age if you talk it out with them.

¡Sí, Se Puede! / Yes, We Can! by Diana Cohn. A bilingual story of a successful janitors' strike in LA, this one focuses on young Carlito. He's trying to figure out how to support his mom, a janitor fighting for better wages. His teacher helps him figure out how to write a powerful protest sign.

Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers Strike of 1909 by Michelle Markel. Clara Lemlich was a young Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who led the biggest women's worker strike in US history. Girls and immigrants have power, have a voice, and can bring about change.

Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family's Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh. This one brought in a Pure Belpre Honor and a Robert F. Sibert Honor in 2015, and it's a powerful book for teaching the impact of organizing and using the law to your advantage.f

Malala Yousafzai: Warrior with Words by Karen Leggett Abouraya. Malala's famous story of being shot by the Taliban and becoming even more outspoken for girls' right to education is kind of a scary one to share with preschoolers. But, she's such a powerful role model who used her voice at a young age to bring about change. This book finds a balance that's just right for young children without being too scary.

by Leo Lionni. Swimmy is different from all the other fish he knows, and this has caused him some hardships. But being different can also be amazing, like when he teaches a band of fish how to work together to beat a big, scary bully fish.

by Shane Evans. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought record numbers of peaceful protestors to DC. And ended with Martin Luther King, Jr's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Kids may have heard about the speech recently for MLK Day, but this will help explain what the marching itself was all about.

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, and Harlem's Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. Lewis Michaux, Sr. created a safe space where people could read and talk about how to change the world, a famous bookstore that drew celebrities and people from all over. Pretty powerful stuff, the power of books and the right to assemble.

Elizabeth Leads the Way: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Right to Vote by Tanya Lee Stone. Stanton is the suffragist credited with really starting the women's right to vote movement in the US. The movement was problematic because it failed to represent women of color at the time, and it's worth talking about that with kids. But this book will still help kids understand the power of speaking up and speaking out for equal rights.

Miss Paul and the President by Dean Robbins. Alice Paul was a suffragist and activist who managed to win over President Woodrow Wilson for the women's right to vote after she organized a parade that upstaged his inauguration, got arrested, and met with him personally in the White House. She continued the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton that eventually led to the 19th Amendment, and this book perfectly explains her cause and what she accomplished for a very young audience. For anyone who dismisses protesting, or the power of women to organize, march, and fight for their rights, Paul's story is a great reinforcement for young kids learning how to stand up and be heard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
13 Books to Teach Children About Protesting and Activism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a politically charged time to be alive in the US. Yesterday's Women's March brought out incredible numbers of people in cities and towns around the world who exercised what we consider a fundamental right in America. Maybe you had your young children with you, like I did.

# data[].attributes.headline
Books about Activism and Protest for Children

# data[].attributes.subject
Books about Activism and Protest for Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a politically charged time to be alive in the US. Yesterday's Women's March brought out incredible numbers of people in cities and towns around the world who exercised what we consider a fundamental right in America. Maybe you had your young children with you, like I did. I realized while we were marching in a local protest that activism can be a hard thing to define to young kids. Keep the conversation going with these books that help explain and demonstrate what it's all about.

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. The crayons are fed up, and they're going to let Duncan know exactly why. Show kids the power of letter writing, how a strike can help you fight for your rights, and the power of listening when you're in charge.

Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin. The barnyard animals start with a politely typed request to the farmer, but when he ignores them, they take peaceful and hilarious action. Never cross a cow with a typewriter.

A Is For Activist by Innosanto Nagara. An absolutely gorgeous alphabet book teaching some of the basics of social justice, too.

by Nikki Giovanni. This book is gorgeous, and packed with information about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. The text of her story may work better for kids in maybe 2nd grade and up, but the amazing Bryan Collier's illustrations (honestly, we are not worthy) and essence of what Ms. Parks's protest was about can come through for any age if you talk it out with them.

¡Sí, Se Puede! / Yes, We Can! by Diana Cohn. A bilingual story of a successful janitors' strike in LA, this one focuses on young Carlito. He's trying to figure out how to support his mom, a janitor fighting for better wages. His teacher helps him figure out how to write a powerful protest sign.

Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers Strike of 1909 by Michelle Markel. Clara Lemlich was a young Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who led the biggest women's worker strike in US history. Girls and immigrants have power, have a voice, and can bring about change.

Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family's Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh. This one brought in a Pure Belpre Honor and a Robert F. Sibert Honor in 2015, and it's a powerful book for teaching the impact of organizing and using the law to your advantage.f

Malala Yousafzai: Warrior with Words by Karen Leggett Abouraya. Malala's famous story of being shot by the Taliban and becoming even more outspoken for girls' right to education is kind of a scary one to share with preschoolers. But, she's such a powerful role model who used her voice at a young age to bring about change. This book finds a balance that's just right for young children without being too scary.

by Leo Lionni. Swimmy is different from all the other fish he knows, and this has caused him some hardships. But being different can also be amazing, like when he teaches a band of fish how to work together to beat a big, scary bully fish.

by Shane Evans. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought record numbers of peaceful protestors to DC. And ended with Martin Luther King, Jr's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Kids may have heard about the speech recently for MLK Day, but this will help explain what the marching itself was all about.

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, and Harlem's Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. Lewis Michaux, Sr. created a safe space where people could read and talk about how to change the world, a famous bookstore that drew celebrities and people from all over. Pretty powerful stuff, the power of books and the right to assemble.

Elizabeth Leads the Way: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Right to Vote by Tanya Lee Stone. Stanton is the suffragist credited with really starting the women's right to vote movement in the US. The movement was problematic because it failed to represent women of color at the time, and it's worth talking about that with kids. But this book will still help kids understand the power of speaking up and speaking out for equal rights.

Miss Paul and the President by Dean Robbins. Alice Paul was a suffragist and activist who managed to win over President Woodrow Wilson for the women's right to vote after she organized a parade that upstaged his inauguration, got arrested, and met with him personally in the White House. She continued the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton that eventually led to the 19th Amendment, and this book perfectly explains her cause and what she accomplished for a very young audience. For anyone who dismisses protesting, or the power of women to organize, march, and fight for their rights, Paul's story is a great reinforcement for young kids learning how to stand up and be heard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
13 Books to Teach Children About Protesting and Activism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a politically charged time to be alive in the US. Yesterday's Women's March brought out incredible numbers of people in cities and towns around the world who exercised what we consider a fundamental right in America. Maybe you had your young children with you, like I did.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabeth Graeber for NPR

Social activist Innosanto Nagara wanted to find a fun book to read to his 2-year-old son that also talked about the importance of social justice.

He wasn't looking for the typical fiction written for children. Instead, he was looking for unique narratives - by writers of color and/or authors who can speak about social issues through their own experiences.

Nagara couldn't find any. So he wrote one.

"Parents and teachers are realizing that what students read and learn affects how they see the world." said Deborah Menkart, Executive Director for Teaching for Change, an organization that puts together social justice reading lists to inspire children throughout the summer.

"Give kids credit," says Stan Yogi, one of the authors on our list. "They have an innate sense of what's right and what's wrong. Being able to draw on that innate sense of justice through relatable stories is so important."

Not all parents have the time to do what Innosanto Nagara did.

For those who can't, we've compiled a list - with help from Teaching for Change - of books that frame big issues through a lens children can understand.

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Looking for books to feed your child's curiosity and ignite the social activist inside of them? Here's our list of children's books to keep your child occupied all summer long.

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Op-Ed in Times from Republican Congressman

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Op-Ed in Times from Republican Congressman

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Opinion | I’m Republican. I Appreciate Assault Weapons. And I Support a Ban. (Published 2018)

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I’m a congressman who was in the Army. I know how lethal these weapons are because I used them in combat.

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#NeverAgain vs Black Lives Matter Movement

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#NeverAgain vs Black Lives Matter Movement

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#NeverAgain vs Black Lives Matter Movement

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#NeverAgain vs Black Lives Matter Movement

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ACLU call for students to learn more about their rights

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ACLU call for students to learn more about their rights

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Take action, join our fight for rights and freedom

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ACLU call for students to learn more about their rights

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ACLU call for students to learn more about their rights

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Take action, join our fight for rights and freedom

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Colleges Pledging to Support Students who Have Been Suspended for Responsible Protest

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Colleges Pledging to Support Students who Have Been Suspended for Responsible Protest

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Right, Left, Center Opinions on Gun Control

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Right, Left, Center Opinions on Gun Control

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Right, Left, Center Opinions on Gun Control

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Right, Left, Center Opinions on Gun Control

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Harvard GSE Resources for Talking to Children about Gun Violence and Protest

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Harvard GSE Resources for Talking to Children about Gun Violence and Protest

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Harvard GSE Resources for Talking to Children about Gun Violence and Protest

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Harvard GSE Resources for Talking to Children about Gun Violence and Protest

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More Perfect Podcast- The Gun Show

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple months ago, the More Perfect team and I released a doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we talk about guns in this country. It landed right after the mass shooting in Vegas. Unfortunately, here we are again. We noticed that a lot of More Perfect listeners were sharing this doc in the wake of what happened in Florida. So we thought we would share it with Radiolab listeners who haven't heard it yet. It's reported by a guy named Sean Rameswaram. At the time, Sean was a producer at More Perfect. He's since gone on to start a daily podcast at Vox called Today Explained. I encourage you to check out that show. Sean is amazing. In the meantime, here's The Gun Show.

SEAN RAMESWARAM: I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

SEAN: Not that one. No, I got a different one. "A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.

JAD: Say it one more time. Say -- I'm sorry.

JAD: And do it -- do it with the commas again.

SEAN: Sure. "A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, totally unnecessary comma, shall not be infringed.

SEAN: Adam Winkler, who wrote the book on the Second Amendment. And that book is called Gunfight.

SEAN: He's a professor of law ...

SEAN: Which is like a nerdy, professorial joke. But like, seriously, what is it? And, like, it had to be this one? Couldn't it have been the amendment about, like, quartering soldiers in your house that was really confusing?

SEAN: No, it's the one about guns that they made, like, just indecipherable.

SEAN: So when this thing was written, we had just fought this war with the British, this Revolutionary War. And they tried to win it right from the get-go by coming for our guns. So these new states are looking at this new federal government, they're going like, "Meh, we don't know if we want to trust you quite yet." So there's this second amendment that says, "You guys can fight back."

JAD: Like, the feds aren't gonna disarm you. You can -- your militias can keep your guns.

SEAN: That's I think what we agree on. But then after that, you just look at the sentence, then it's not just the commas that are confusing. If you look at the sentence as a whole ...

SEAN: There's some noun confusion. I mean, it's obvious that the sentence is about someone's right to bear arms, but who? Who gets that right? At the beginning of the sentence you get ...

SEAN: The militia. States have a right to form militias, to assemble groups of people. And those people got to have their guns. That's easy enough. But then later in the sentence, there's ...

SEAN: The people. Which people? Those people over there in the militia? All people? If you mean all people, why did you say militia? It's like the first clause seems to point to some sort of collective right to bear arms, and the second clause seems to point to some individual right to bear arms.

SEAN: This is Jill Lepore.

SEAN: She's also a professor of American History.

SEAN: And Jill says from the beginning, when people thought about the Second Amendment, they tended to just focus on the first part.

SEAN: That this confusing sentence was widely read as this collective militia right, not an individual one.

SEAN: Jill says that just didn't exist.

SEAN: This is Stephen Halbrook. He's represented the NRA in several cases.

SEAN: He actually thinks A) the sentence is just fine as is.

SEAN: B) the framers were thinking about an individual right to bear arms.

JAD: So which -- which was it?

SEAN: That's -- that's a really good question, Jad. I mean, it's a complicated one too. What I can tell you is that, you know, people I spoke to for the story said at least in the 20th century when the -- when the Second Amendment was taught in law schools, it was taught as this -- it was taught as this sort of antiquated, outdated thing that had to do with militias, not so much individual rights. But Jill Lepore, Stephen Halbrook, and their respective sides, something they can both agree on is that this super-sacred Second Amendment, this third rail of our American politics today, that just was not a thing. It was not like that.

SEAN: People ignored this amendment.

SEAN: Don't get me wrong. This is not to say people didn't think about guns. People had guns, states regulated guns. But for most of our history, the Second Amendment it was like -- it was like sort of the runt of the Bill of Rights litter. Like, no one argued about it.

SEAN: There was no fight. No fight.

SEAN: Because there was this window of time where all of this changes, the script just flips. There's 200 years of everything being chill, and then suddenly you get this.

SEAN: So basically in just a flash, the Second Amendment goes from being ignored to being ...

SEAN: Explosive, to being radioactive. And in the process, we start to read the thing totally differently. All of a sudden, it's this hotly debated thing that's got nothing to do with that first part and everything to do with the second part.

SEAN: Everything to do with my personal right. And me.

SEAN: And what I want to know is, how did that happen? How did we start reading the Second Amendment the way we do now? And what I found out is that, in the modern history of the gun rights movement and -- and how we read the Second Amendment can be boiled down to these three totally unrelated, disjointed-seeming, revolutionary events.

SEAN: One, an invasion in Sacramento.

SEAN: Two, a revolt in Cincinnati.

SEAN: Number three, a reckoning at the Supreme Court of the United States.

JAD: So you're gonna tell me the story in three chapters?

[MORE PERFECT INTRO]

NARRATOR: Chapter 1. The Invasion.

SEAN: Yeah. So this transition from the militia to the individual, my right to bear arms, you could argue that that whole individual gun rights movement started in the 1960s with the Black Panthers in Oakland.

SEAN: Just to give some context. This is 1966. It's been an exceptionally bad time for race relations all over the country.

SEAN: Protesters are being beaten at sit-ins. There's attack dogs and hoses. And in particular ...

SEAN: There was major tension between the Black community and the police.

SEAN: October, 1966, Bobby Seale and his friend Huey P, Newton, they start this organization called the Black Panthers.

SEAN: Now Huey, Bobby's co-founder ...

SEAN: He was going to the University of San Francisco's School of Law, and one day he's sitting there as you do in law school, thinking about the law, thinking about Malcolm X, thinking about what he can do in Oakland. And it hits him.

SEAN: That they could argue that the Second Amendment gave them a right to have a gun.

JAD: And no one had ever said that before?

SEAN: But Adam Winkler says people who argued that were in the minority. They weren't taken too seriously. This was one of the first times that the individual rights reading was forced into the mainstream, because coming out of law school class, Huey tells Bobby if we have a right to bear arms, we individuals?

SEAN: Huey pointed to that second half of the Second Amendment.

SEAN: He also pointed to a California state law that said you could carry a gun as long as it wasn't concealed.

SEAN: Bobby told me about the first time they did it.

SEAN: He says it was a weekend night, a police officer had pulled over some guy. And they started watching from down the street, and a crowd starts to gather.

SEAN: So you got this white cop on one side of the street.

SEAN: And on the other side of the street, you got a dozen black guys holding shotguns.

SEAN: He told me the moment the cop noticed. He immediately stopped what he was doing with the guy he had pulled over and walked over to them and said ...

SEAN: And this is where the dominoes start to fall. The standoff resolved themselves peacefully, but the cops in Oakland are not happy. And they -- they immediately start running this up the chain.

SEAN: So this bill, the Mulford Act, is up for debate at the California state capitol in Sacramento. And Bobby Seale decides the Panthers should be there for the debate and that they should take their guns.

SEAN: So they roll up to the assembly in Sacramento. And guess who happens to be waiting for them right there on the front lawn of the assembly?

JAD: What are we talking what year are we talking now?

SEAN: Guess who's governor?

JAD: I don't know. Who was the governor?

SEAN: So you got Ronald Reagan.

SEAN: And a bunch of white kids.

SEAN: Hanging out on the front lawn of the -- of the State Building in Sacramento. And this is the 1960s. This would be insane now.

SEAN: And he says some of the kids ...

SEAN: So Reagan's like, "What's going on?" The press is like, "What's going on?" And Bobby Seale ...

ARCHIVE CLIP, Bobby Seale: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general ...]

ARCHIVE CLIP, Bobby Seale: ... and the Black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California Legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.]
BOBBY SEALE: Et cetera.
SEAN: And he says while he was reading that ...

SEAN: Grab Ronald Reagan ...

SEAN: And when they got off the elevator, he asked someone which way to the spectator section so the Panthers could watch the legislature debate the bill.

JAD: Wait. they walked into the state capitol with -- with shotguns?

SEAN: And then all hell breaks loose.

SEAN: You can point to this forgotten, unknown moment here in the State Building in Sacramento as, like, the game changer for the conversation about guns in America. Because suddenly overnight ...

SEAN: But in being introduced to the world, you had a lot of people going, "Wait, what? Like, there's a bunch of Black men rolling around with guns?"

JAD: Walking into the Capitol Building?

SEAN: When there's kids around?

SEAN: Now, people have all kinds of opinions about the Black Panthers and what they did, particularly after Huey Newton ...

SEAN: ... later that same year was arrested for shooting and killing a cop.

SEAN: The case was eventually dismissed, but what seems clear is that the Black Panthers decision to use the Second Amendment to arm themselves to show up armed at the state capitol in California ...

SEAN: In California, but also federal gun control.

SEAN: Suddenly, America was like, "We've got to get guns off the streets."

SEAN: Every action creates a reaction. And at the same time that this Panthers thing is hitting front pages of newspapers around the world, you've got assassinations, you've got race riots, you've got Vietnam protests. All of a sudden, everyone's clamoring for gun control. Democrats and Republicans. In fact ...

SEAN: Reagan. That was the exact same day as the Black Panthers showed up at the state capitol in Sacramento with their shotguns.

JAD: So Reagan. Reagan was into gun control.

SEAN: Reagan's got his fingerprints all over this thing. What's happening here is the Black Panthers show up in the capital, Sacramento, and Ronald Reagan react. They create some gun control. Then there's even more gun control, even federal gun control. And a lot of people are sitting at home watching this and they start to get very upset. Which brings us to ...

NARRATOR: Chapter 2. The Revolt.

SEAN: These two guys, John Aquilino.

SEAN: They get us there. And they've both been into guns pretty much their entire lives.

SEAN: But neither one of them was particularly hard core about their gun beliefs until around the time the Black Panthers came along.

SEAN: John told me, Joe as well that it wasn't the Panthers themselves that were the problem.

SEAN: It was all the gun control laws that came in the wake of the Panthers.

SEAN: Joe says he starts to see gun shops in his neighborhood close. Like, the furniture store in Buffalo that used to have ...

SEAN: They stop selling them. And he says that just really bothered him because the reason you have a gun is for protection.

SEAN: Which wasn't an abstract idea for him. Buffalo in the '60s and '70s, not the safest place in the world. His house was even broken into.

SEAN: Joe says he and his wife and his dog huddled in one room with a gun while these two guys stormed through his house and robbed him.

SEAN: Joe's whole relationship with firearms is sort of predicated upon that -- this idea that it's for self-defense. And here he's got people breaking into his house. He's got the cops not being there for him. He's got the government trying to take his gun away. So what do you do? You join the NRA.

SEAN: But this came at a moment where the NRA was at this crossroads unlike any it had seen before or since. Back when Joe joined in the early '70s ...

SEAN: Because according to Adam Winkler it was never meant to be.

SEAN: And, you know, you don't hear much about the NRA's founders ...

SEAN: Yeah, for, like, a hundred years their main focus was, like, teaching Boy Scouts how to shoot straight.

SEAN: It's like the NRA's version of Playboy. Guns instead of girls.

SEAN: The NRA at that point was sort of like a gun trade group. They were not super political, and -- and the people who ran it ...

SEAN: They were just like these wealthy businessmen who like to hunt, according to Joe.

SEAN: But you had all these people coming in, like Joe and like John ...

SEAN: And this would lead to this straight-up head-on collision at the NRA. Now, right when Joe and John joined the NRA, the organization had just for the first time sort of set up this lobbying arm.

SEAN: John actually got hired to work there in 1976.

SEAN: That's what they both wanted it to do.

SEAN: In the mid-'70s, the part of the NRA that lobbied politicians had to rent office space from the hotel next door to the NRA.

SEAN: Right after he was hired ...

SEAN: Sell the headquarters there.

SEAN: The older guard didn't seem to have the stomach for whatever gunfight some members wanted to have.

SEAN: They thought, like, "Maybe we should try and kind of get out of this whole gun business thing."

SEAN: John says there was even a moment when a report surface that suggested ...

SEAN: This is from one of those meetings.

SEAN: Now prior to this big meeting, there had been little meetings.

SEAN: Joe and a few other guys ...

SEAN: They'd been going back and forth.

SEAN: One point they even met up.

SEAN: And they decided to form a small but fierce faction within the NRA.

SEAN: And this tiny group planned a coup.

SEAN: The Federation members were all wearing buttons that said National Rifle Association with the word 'Rifle' underlined.

SEAN: They spread out through the crowd.

SEAN: Pledge of Allegiance.

SEAN: When it came time for the members' part of the meeting where members submit proposals which happens in, like, this super parliamentary sort of way. This guy ...

SEAN: He was part of their group.

SEAN: Translation. We've got these 15 demands.

SEAN: The demands are basically, number one: we demand that the NRA not move its headquarters.

SEAN: We demand the Institute for Legislative Action, which you want to kill, should have more power.

SEAN: And we demand that the current NRA leadership be replaced.

SEAN: So the Federation guys making all these demands ...

SEAN: That was running the meeting ...

SEAN: Every time the Federation guy would make a motion ...

SEAN: And then the floor debate would begin. People would start to speak for and against each amendment. The Federation members would use their walkie-talkies to coordinate who spoke at what microphone.

SEAN: So as each of the 15 amendments are being debated, the insurrectionists are running around in their orange caps with their walkie-talkies trying to rally support from everyone.

SEAN: But Joe says one of the big turning points is when a guy named Bob Kukla gets up to the mic. He was at the time the head of the Institute for Legislative Action. He gets up to the mic.

SEAN: You remember cassette tapes, right? This was one that Bob Kukla secretly recorded.

SEAN: But what you hear on this tape is Bob Kukla talking to his bosses at the NRA, and they're yelling at him.

SEAN: They're basically like, "Bob, shut up!"

SEAN: Over the course of this one nine-hour meeting on a hot steamy night in Cincinnati, every single one of those 15 proposals was passed.

SEAN: Ensured the NRA wouldn't change its name. They fired the leadership.

SEAN: And maybe the biggest change, the most important change was that the Institute for Legislative Action, this political lobbying arm of the NRA, it was given the keys to the car. They were not the bastard stepchild anymore. They were the NRA.

SEAN: And just shortly after this coup, the NRA bolts this abridged version of the Second Amendment right on the wall, front and center in its headquarters.

SEAN: Nice, clean, totally uncomplicated sentence.

SEAN: I asked John, like, what about the militia part of the sentence? Why doesn't the NRA ever talk about that?

SEAN: Post-coup, the NRA took a very hard line on gun control, and became an irrepressible political force in America.

SEAN: They start pouring millions of dollars into lobbying, and just a few years after that Cincinnati revolt, the NRA endorses its first presidential candidate.

SEAN: At this point, everyone and their uncle leaves out the militia part of the Second Amendment, which is why Americans eventually start to forget that the militia clause or whatever you want to call it even exists.

SEAN: This is Jill Lepore again.

SEAN: But even if -- even if the Panthers and the President and the American people are all down to sort of forget about this militia clause of the Second Amendment, it didn't mean a lot without the courts. And the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, weren't buying it.

SEAN: Yeah, so the Supreme Court obviously not dying to have this conversation at the moment. But it's not just the Supreme Court, if you look at the federal courts, the entire federal court system in America, there has not once in our history at this point over 200 years been a single instance of some gun law, some state local gun law getting up to a court and the court going, "You know what? You can't do this. It violates the Second Amendment." That's just not even happening.

JAD: There wasn't a Second Amendment smackdown anywhere in federal court?

SEAN: This isn't -- this isn't a thing.

SEAN: And getting the Supreme Court to weigh in on it? That doesn't even look like it could be a thing. It doesn't even look like much more than a fantasy until ...

SEAN: Dick Heller showed up.

SEAN: And changed everything.

JAD: This is The Gun Show for More Perfect, featured here on Radiolab. We'll continue in a moment.

JAD: That's Sandy Levinson, professor at the University of Texas law school. I'm Jad Abumrad here with Sean Rameswaram. All right, so Sean ...

JAD: It's -- I guess now it's time for Chapter 3, Dick Heller, right?

SEAN: Yeah, we're gonna get to Dick, but first here's what's going on in America. The Second Amendment has become one of those issues that can get you elected. Academics have begun to have a vigorous debate about its meaning. But the Supreme Court is still staying out of it. They're leaving this up to the states which already have all sorts of gun laws of their own to deal with. But then ...

SEAN: But then George W. Bush is elected. The NRA likes George W. Bush.

SEAN: UCLA law professor Adam Winkler again.

SEAN: And almost right after he gets into office, Bush's Attorney General ...

SEAN: This public letter to the NRA ...

SEAN: And that was a first. It's a big deal. Before this, all the decisions had kind of veered in the other direction.

SEAN: Now one thing you need to know about these guys is that they weren't necessarily doing it for the guns.

SEAN: For them, it was more about getting the government to back off.

SEAN: So that was their angle.

JAD: That's -- that is interesting. I've always wondered why the gun rights movement has become such a proxy war for, like, anti-government-ism.

SEAN: Yeah. Well I mean, if you think about it, and this is something Professor Sandy Levinson told me, is that sort of embedded in this amendment is the very idea that you can take up arms ...

SEAN: ... to protect yourself and your fellow man from tyranny.

SEAN: Anyway, getting back to the story, these three libertarian lawyers, they decide to put together a case. And their idea was to target this really restrictive gun law in DC.

SEAN: But in order to challenge that law, they needed to find a plaintiff.

JAD: Interesting. How do you find a plaintiff? You look for somebody who got robbed? What do you do?

SEAN: They found a guy who was gay.

SEAN: Who had previously been assaulted when he lived in California because he was gay.

SEAN: And he wanted a gun to protect himself.

SEAN: She was trying to protect herself against local drug dealers, and the cops actually told her she should get a gun which was illegal.

SEAN: So they had this whole group.

SEAN: And the problem they ran into was that all of these super sympathetic plaintiffs didn't have this very special thing they needed to bring a case.

SEAN: Like, if you're gonna bring a case ...

SEAN: You have to show some physical concrete proof that harm has been done, that you've been denied a gun. And none of the plaintiffs had that. Except for one guy.

SEAN: So he actually gets paid by the Freedom.

SEAN: I met Dick right outside the Supreme Court, the building where he became famous. He's a slim 75-year-old white guy, sports glasses that look straight out of the '70s.

SEAN: I actually happened to meet him in DC the day after Trump won the election.

SEAN: The President-elect was visiting the White House. They were protesters everywhere.

SEAN: Most of the protesters that were passing us were white, but just as a few young Black men pass us by, he says ...

SEAN: We ended up talking at the Hyatt which is just down the street from the Supreme Court. And -- and Dick explained to me that his journey with guns, like John and Joe, began pretty casually. Like, 1976, he's living in DC. And one day he's sitting at home.

SEAN: Different Matt Dillon.

SEAN: But then just a few months after he got that gun ...

SEAN: A trend that started with the Mulford Act and the Black Panthers back in Sacramento hits Washington, DC.

SEAN: You get that gun law which outlawed all handguns.

SEAN: Eventually, he decides on option D: give the gun to his brother.

SEAN: Dick made his gun visitation situation sound functional, but I think like any long-distance relationship it mostly sucked, because more and more he didn't feel safe where he lived.

SEAN: It's clear that living through the crack epidemic in DC really shaped a lot of Dick's views on guns. So in the years after the handgun ban, Dick starts the very long process of finding a way to get his gun back to DC. And he eventually even quits his desk job to pursue getting his gun back full time.

SEAN: Golly! Just like that, Dick was able to have a gun in DC, but only during the day and only while he was working.

SEAN: He finally starts looking for some help, some legal help.

SEAN: And right around the time Dick's out there looking for some help, turns out these lawyers are out there looking for some Dick.

SEAN: He wasn't their ideal, sympathetic guy.

SEAN: You know, because of that plantation thing he said, or he would always talk smack about the federal government in interviews.

SEAN: So he wasn't their favorite plaintiff, but ...

SEAN: And he had this denial slip or whatever it's called. He like, literally had this physical proof of his grievance. And this simple, technical, arbitrary, little stupid piece of paper gave him what's known as standing to bring the case.

SEAN: Regardless, he became their guy, and these three lawyers they take the case to the DC court.

NARRATOR: Chapter 3. The Reckoning

SEAN: This was the first time in our history the Supreme Court would directly try to figure out what the Second Amendment means.

SEAN: DC's lawyer Walter Dellinger gets up and jumps right into it.

SEAN: And he sort of begins with this central question. Like, what was James Madison thinking when he wrote this super confusing sentence, like, 200 years ago? Was he thinking about the individual people and their right to own a gun? Or was he thinking about the collective right of the militia to own a gun?

SEAN: And he says if you look at the phrase ...

SEAN: How it was used at the time ...

SEAN: Dellinger says that if you look at some of Madison's rough drafts of the Second Amendment, it's pretty clear that when he says people have a right to bear arms, all he really means is, like, report for duty.

SEAN: Chief Justice Roberts jumps in and is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa."

SEAN: If they meant just the people in the state militias ...

SEAN: At this point everyone sort of jumps in. A bunch of justices start interrupting each other. It's kind of like a scrum. And they're all trying to figure out okay, so when Madison wrote the phrase ...

SEAN: Like, who were the people he was talking about?

SEAN: Was the people just the militia, or everyone, all the people? What is the relationship between the second part of the sentence, the people part, and the first part of the sentence, the militia part?

SEAN: Scottish Highlanders for some reason. At one point ...

SEAN: They even sort of start to diagram Madison's sentence.

SEAN: And the net result according to Adam Winkler was the four liberals ...

SEAN: Seem to want to emphasize the militia part of the sentence. And then you had the four conservative justices.

SEAN: Who seem to want to emphasize the people part of the sentence. The second part.

SEAN: And Team People's team captain, the quarterback, the first chair that day was without a doubt Justice Antonin Scalia.

SEAN: This is Joan Biskupic.

SEAN: She's also written a biography of Justice Scalia.

SEAN: What you hear throughout the arguments is that Scalia is very, very forwardly pressing the sort of individual rights argument.

SEAN: And justices like David Souter ...

SEAN: Are arguing back saying, "What about the collective? The militia?" This goes on for well over an hour, the justices sort of grilling the lawyers, arguing amongst themselves, everybody trying to figure out what was in James Madison's head. Until finally Justice Breyer, one of the liberal justices is like ...

SEAN: Forget what Madison intended. There is no way for us to know. Let's talk about now. Let's talk about gun violence. This sentence was most definitely written about muskets. What about handguns and assault rifles? What is reasonable now?

SEAN: Alan Gura basically argues when you take away people's guns, they're gonna be less prepared if and when they enlist in the Army. To which Justice Breyer's like, "They can still practice shooting ...

SEAN: Which weren't banned in DC.

SEAN: That, by the way, was Justice Scalia telling Alan Gura how to answer Justice Breyer's question.

SEAN: Anyway, the oral arguments last 97 minutes, far longer than most other cases. And going into the arguments ...

SEAN: And as with all of these close cases ...

SEAN: One of the first things he said was about bears. Like, not bear arms, but grizzly bears. And the point Kennedy was trying to make was clear: don't you think the framers had other reasons that they wanted people to have guns other than just being in a militia? Like, what about people being in their homes and just needing to defend themselves?

SEAN: RIP the militia clause. December 15, 1791, to June 26, 2008. A pretty good run, if I'm being honest. For the first time in the history of these United States, the courts definitively declared that the Second Amendment gives every American the right to a gun for self-defense.

SEAN: Of course, not everyone agreed.

SEAN: This is Jack Rakove.

SEAN: He filed a brief for the court, and he says Scalia's reading of the history is just wrong.

SEAN: You could argue that we shouldn't even be talking about history.

SEAN: And that ultimately -- and here he echoed Justice Stevens in his dissent.

SEAN: But -- there's a very big but.

SEAN: And this is another thing that we tend to forget. The decision says every individual has a right to bear arms, but most interestingly, like, the decision also says of course, we need gun control. The word Heller has come to represent, like, Second Amendment rights. Like, are you for Heller or are you against Heller? Even though being for Heller is being for gun control.

SEAN: Yeah, it is. I mean, after all this time, it's still just totally confusing. You have a right to a gun, but the government has a right to regulate it. Dick Keller gets his gun back in DC, but DC still also has all sorts of gun regulations. And you see the same pattern all over the country. Some states are lenient, some are super strict, and both approaches seem to comply with Heller. In a way, the Heller Decision is just like all those commas and clauses that we started with in James Madison's sentence. It's this confusing declaration that leaves the door wide open for interpretation. Which obviously sucks. We could have used a little more clarity on how to live with this Second Amendment right to bear arms. But that door being open, it gives us an opportunity, I think. An opportunity to get it right, to fix it. And it seems like now would be a pretty good time.

JAD: That was The Gun Show from More Perfect, and producer Sean Rameswaram. Huge thanks to him. Check out his show, Today Explained on Vox. Thanks to Adam Winkler. We drew a lot of the information from this episode from his book, Gunfight. Thanks also to Suzie Lechtenberg, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sarah Qari, Jenny Lawton, Alex Overington and the full More Perfect team which includes, you know, Cristian Farias, Linda Hirshman, Elie Mystal, David Gable and Michelle Harris. Thank you to Oyez for all the Supreme Court audio. They're a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.
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The Gun Show | More Perfect | WNYC Studios

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RADIOLAB INTRO] JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple months ago, the More Perfect team and I released a doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we talk about guns in this country.

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