The UK student taking aim at the US gun lobby

Over the past month, Lewis Mizen, a 17-year-old student at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has talked a lot about Valentine’s Day. He has been asked about it often but still there’s a catch in his voice as he speaks. “I remember walking on the campus,” he says. “There was such a feeling of optimism. There was pink and red everywhere. There was a great feeling. It was a really good day.”

Early in the mo rning there was a fire drill. Towards the end of the afternoon the alarm rang again. “We all began walking out and administrators began screaming at us: ‘Code Red!’ which means ‘active shooter’. We all thought it was a drill. So we ran back in the classroom. After about half an hour of hiding under the desk we got an update from the police department that this wasn’t a drill. That’s when we moved to the closet.

“We were in the closet for maybe an hour and a half. While we were in there we were getting updates from all sorts of news agencies telling us different things. Finally, about two hours after the Code Red was announced, the army reserves and the SWAT came in to get us out. We had to run across campus with these people carrying assault rifles guarding us, then we had to put our backpacks in a pile to make sure that there weren’t any bombs. Once we had done that we were able to walk towards our families. Most of the parents were a mile away but they began walking towards the school, and they didn’t know where their kids were. They didn’t know if they got out. So when we got maybe half a mile away there was just this surge of all these parents looking for their kids. But they weren’t allowed to get too close — the FBI were there, there were so many people it was like a movie set.”

In the aftermath, Mizen found his own way of dealing with the event. “It all happens so fast, you don’t consider how real it is” he says. “I guess everyone has their coping mechanism but for me, I didn’t think it was real. It wasn’t until that night that it hit, that this was real. That people had died, and life has changed forever.”

- Lewis Mizen

It wasn’t a drill. It wasn’t a movie. The horror was real. In a nightmare which has grown all too familiar on American school campuses, 17 students and teachers were massacred on February 14, allegedly by former school student Nikolas Cruz, who has been charged with firing an AR-15 rifle (legally acquired, according to his lawyer) into four classrooms. Since Columbine in 1999 (13 innocents murdered), through Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 dead) to Sandy Hook in 2012 (26 students and teachers killed), school shootings have developed their own numb grammar. Generally, this amounts to expressions of sympathy, a call for action, thoughts and prayers, and then nothing, until the next mass shooting, when the process is rinsed and repeated.

This time, things may be different. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High have seized the political initiative. Five of the Parkland survivors are on the cover of this week’s TIME magazine, and this weekend they have organised the March For Our Lives in Washington DC, with supporting events around the world.

Mizen, who is originally from Coventry and moved to the US three years ago, will be flying from Florida to Washington to cover the event for his student newspaper. He says the mood in Parkland was bleak in the immediate aftermath of the shootings but turned quickly.

“The day after, there was a feeling of hopelessness. Especially around the vigils there was a sense of: ‘Where do we go from here?’ But a day after that, everyone mobilised the media and people they knew who they thought could have the power to make change. The student body has moved fantastically — we really do feel like this is different than any other movement. We feel like we’ve hit breaking point because we’re not going to let things stay the way they are. Something is going to change.”

The stumbling block in arguments about US gun control is the lobbying power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which manages to distort the broad (and rising) support within the populace for tougher legislation. The Parkland students don’t all agree on tactics, though they share a common understanding of where they want to go.

“The Second Amendment [the right to bear arms] is a constitutional right,” Mizen concedes. “Some of my classmates have been very radical in stating what they want. The problem with that is it pushes people away. Instead of trying to build bridges they’re insulting the opposition, and that’s not how anything is going to change. One thing I and some of my classmates who are more moderate are trying to get across is that we don’t want to attack anyone. We don’t want to place the emphasis on gun control, we want to put it on keeping kids safe. If we change the conversation to keeping kids safe then it makes it more difficult for the people who love guns to argue with us, because to come out against us would be to come out against keeping kids safe. When they do argue, it makes them look evil.

“On the one-month anniversary [of the shooting] the NRA posted a video saying how much they love guns — kind of a threatening video. They did exactly the opposite of what they should have done. It’s made it easier for us as students to mobilise against them and to try and push for change, because they’re appearing like the bad guys.”

There have been some signs of political change. The tactic of targeting companies which offered benefits to NRA members or support to the organisation has resulted in several of them cutting their ties, including Delta and United Airlines, and car rental firms Enterprise and Hertz. “American government is mobilised by money,” says Mizen. “If you weaken the bargaining power of interest groups by pulling their funds away then it weakens them and it makes it easier to move forward. That’s real, that’s hard-hitting, and that’s something we can do to damage the people who don’t want change.”

Florida governor Rick Scott — once an ardent NRA supporter — was one of the first politicians to switch sides, signing into law a gun control measure which requires the buyers of rifles and shotguns to be 21 (Cruz was 18 when he bought his weapon). This modest change promoted an immediate NRA lawsuit.

“Some of my classmates went on 60 Minutes and they said they’d give Rick Scott’s bill a C minus. I think it’s an A plus. It’s a great start. More has happened in a month than happened in the past 20 years. It’s not the end of the line and we’re going to keep pushing. The fact that the NRA is now suing proves we are moving in the right direction. I’m really proud of the state of Florida and I hope other states follow suit. Then, eventually, the Federal government can issue a mandate and laws that help make sure that every kid in every school across the United States is safe.”

Mizen says the activism and the excitement of campaigning has given him and the other Parkland students something positive to focus on but it is a process. “Every day it’s getting easier. But every day it’s also becoming that little more real. It’s kind of setting in that this is the new normal. This has actually happened. It’s no longer a nightmare. But having other people around, having friends, having family, makes it easier; to learn to live with this new normal, to learn to move past it, to always keep it in your heart and your mind, but to be able to live your life.”

In the longer term, the students are focused on the US midterm elections in November. “We don’t care whether Republicans win or Democrats win, we just want the people who win to be focusing on gun control. We don’t care what party you’re in. We want serious change. Voter registration has spiked since this happened. That’s fantastic, and we really could make a change. But we need to keep the momentum going.”

First, there is this weekend, and Mizen has a message for Londoners. “There’s a rally in London on Saturday and if there’s a message I can give it’s just that as many people as possible should go. As much as this is a specifically American issue, the support from around the world helps keep up the pressure. Even if you’re just sending messages of support to the families it is huge, because it helps us get through it. It helps us move forward, and to know that people are standing behind you even if they’re thousands of miles away is a massive help.”

The London rally is tomorrow at noon, at the US Embassy, 33 Nine Elms Lane, SW11 7US