November 13, 2020 • 21 mins
Gun violence prevention has risen to the forefront of American politics because of the mass casualty events that have devastated our communities and the day-to-day violence that commands less attention but destroys even more lives. It’s also getting attention because of the phenomenal work being done from groups like March For Our Lives, co-founded by David Hogg. David is a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history took place in 2018. As part of our special series with youth leaders, David talks to Pete about dedicating his time fighting for gun legislation, approaching youth leadership with humility, and why gun violence is a symptom of a much bigger injustice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, I'm Pete godh Judge, and this is the deciding decade.
In spring, the gun reform organization Every Town came out
with the report that detailed gun violence in our country.
They found that every day, more than one Americans are
killed with guns and two hundred more are shot and wounded.
Our gun homicide rate is twenty five times that of
(00:28):
other high income countries. Firearms are the leading cause of
death for American children and teens. This issue has risen
to the forefront of American politics because of the mass
casualty events that have devastated our communities and the day
by day violence that commands less attention but destroys even
more lives. It's also getting attention because of the phenomenal
(00:48):
work that groups like every Town, Mom's Demand Action and
March for Our Lives have done. Because there is so
much work left to do, it's a great time to
have a conversation, and we're joined by one of the
lead ars who has been doing extraordinary work day in
and day at Today I'm joined by David Hogg, one
of the founders of March for Our Lives, an organization
dedicated to harnessing the power of young people across the
(01:11):
country to fight for sensible gun violence prevention policies that
save lives. In two thousand eighteen, David, then a senior
at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was
at school while a gunman with a semi automatic rifle
shot and killed seventeen people and injured seventeen others. It
was the deadliest high school shooting in US history. Since then,
in addition to starting March for Our Lives with his peers,
(01:34):
David has written a book with his sister called hashtag
Never Again, A Generation draws the Line, and he's dedicated
his time to fighting for gun legislation and other important causes.
Now a busy student at Harvard, he has already accomplished
so much and served as a leader of guide in
an inspiration to many. David, welcome, really glad to have
you than I want to begin just by asking about
(01:56):
your journey into activism, obviously born out of trauma, but
also I gather you were a very civically interested person
as a high school student. What was that moment of propulsion,
like when you saw a nation watching what had happened
to you and your peers? And saw that even as
(02:17):
a teenager, you had a tool kit that you could
use to help turn that into a moment that might
lead to a movement that would save lives. Yeah, I mean,
it was certainly an interesting moment. I think I realized that,
you know, certainly after I got home after the shooting
had happened, and my sister got home. She was a
freshman at the time, and she had lost four friends
(02:37):
that day. The unimaginable pain of that and the amount
of crying that I heard made me so physically and
emotionally uncomfortable. All that because for the first time in
my life, as my sister is, you know, big brother,
I couldn't do anything to make it better. So I
decided to do the only thing that I really knew
how to at the time. Because of my experience in
speech and debate and TV production, I knew that the
(02:58):
far too many mass shootings that we've had the country
typically don't last more than a week at most, you know,
in the media, and I didn't want I didn't just
want a bunch of talking heads going on you know,
CNN and Fox and stuff, debating random stuff without realizing
the human cost of these tragedies. So I decided to
go out there to speak for people like my sister
who couldn't at the time, um so that they would
(03:19):
be able to tell their truth and speak about it
when they were able to make their voice cured after
they're able to recover some you know, and to this day,
there's still many people understandably that haven't. You know, a
lot of us would probably never recover fully from it.
But that's kind of what it was like as I
realized that. You know, initially I went out there to
try to tell the story of what happened that day,
basically as a journalist, but I still realized that only
(03:41):
showing people doing cost of these things wasn't going to
be enough to actually change and try to prevent them.
Um So, after I got a text from a front
of mine, I met at his house with a bunch
of other people, and that's how, you know, we started
talking about doing a march in Washington where we thought
we would get about ninety people and ended up getting
just about a million. So one of the things I
really admired about what you built with March for Our
(04:02):
Lives is an attention to the fact that gun violences
every day. So there are these headline grabbing moments that,
let's face it, are more likely to involve more white
victims on average than the day to day gun violence
in so many cities and including my own, where the
victims are usually black and brown young men. And you
(04:23):
formed a coalition of people who had experienced every different
kind of gun violence with a lot of self awareness.
You talk about what that process was like and how
people with very different life experiences were able to come
together when their experiences of gun violence were also very
different as you look from mass shootings to what's unfolding
almost nightly in so many of our communities. Yeah, I
(04:46):
think that process of coalition building has been one of
the most transformative and educational experiences of my lifetime. It
showed me, especially, you know, coming from a community like Parkland,
growing up in a predominantly white suburbs of my entire life,
you know, I understand it that I didn't understand what
happens in North Miami or Liberty City, for example, to
refer it to South Florida or anywhere else in the
(05:07):
country that experiences gun violence. What we attempted to do
is come at it with the lens of humility and
understanding that you know, we don't know the work that
goes on there on a daily basis, We don't know
what happens with my friends of the South from West
Side of Chicago that worked with Grave youth leaders of St. Savannah.
One of the most important things that I've learned in
that process is that sometimes it's just as important as
(05:28):
a leader to be able to shut up and just
listen um and just hear people to understand what they've
gone through, because you're not going to get that from
the news, because these victims don't get in the news rarely,
if ever. And as a result of that, you have
to realize, like all of these communities are incredibly traumatized,
you know, and what's not going to save them is
the history of like the intertwining of white supremacy and
(05:51):
white statorship, where people like myself, for example, would come
from the suburbs oftentimes and say, here's what I'm gonna
do to save you and your community because of issues
that I'm inherently complicit in, such as white supremacy. You know,
I think for a lot of those people, myself included,
I'll admit at the beginning, like it makes uncomfortable because
work taught a history that is heavily propagandized in whitewash
(06:13):
about the history of white supremacy and its foundations in
this country. And I think, really, what I went in
that process where than anything, is don't go to people
and say here's what I'm gonna do for you, here's
how I'm gonna say. You're a community. You simply asked,
how can I be supportive of what you're doing in
a humble way, you know, And that's really what I've
what I've done. So being on national television puts a
(06:34):
lot of pressure on your humility. And one of the
things I think about a lot for you in your
generation of activists is you're young people. You're in college,
You're in a formative stage of your life right now,
and yet you also have a level of visibility that
a lot of your classmates may wind up working decades
to establish. How do you keep focus and how do
(06:57):
you think about what you've already established, this is what
you still need to cultivate just personally in order to
grow into the kind of citizen and leader and advocate
that you aim to be in the in the long run. Yeah,
I think it's it's certainly difficult because you know, most
nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenty year olds, you know, actually was
seventeen when it shouldn't happen. You know, most of us
(07:20):
don't have a million people or more seeing every mistake
that we make publicly. Um, and that's it's really difficult
because you know, in my opinion, a lot of learning
is just a series of mistakes that you've learned to
stop making over time. And I feel a certain responsibility
as a young person to admit to those mistakes when
I do make them. And another lesson that I would
say that I've learned through this process of learning how
(07:41):
to lead. By looking through really amazing mainly women actually
that are the predominant leaders and organizing I've seen get
very little, if any, of the credit a lot of
the time by looking to them, I've realized that one
of the most important things is a leader to do
is know that it's equally important to know that you're
right as it is to be able to admit when
you're wrong and be okay with that and learn how
to recover from that and have that validation of people
(08:03):
around you that expect you to learn along the way. UM.
And luckily I have a great family March for our Lives.
You know of activists and young people of all different
races and classes, um, you know from all over the
country that you know now really are some of the
best friends that I've ever made in my life that
are you know, helping me learn with that process, um,
and learning to call me in when I do mess up,
(08:23):
because I do, you know. UM. I think the other
thing too is realizing that the important thing is that
the work gets done, it's not so much the credit.
So one thing that I tried to do a lot
of the time is always try to get credit to
people that I think are really doing the work, because
it's never really just me at least in activism. Is
like there's a big problem with this like cloud of
thist stereotype within gen Z, which is this belief that
(08:44):
there's some activists that do this work because they want
credit on social media or they want to following, when
really that's the opposite of why you should be doing this,
Like you're doing this for other people. And what I
try to do just constantly shine credit to our team
and other organizations too. I think in the nonprofits racism.
You know, it's understandable that there are there's competition for funding,
but I think it's important to highlight the work that
(09:06):
especially being done and has been done before groups like
March for Olives were ever here in the first place,
in those predominantly black and brown communities, and and highlight
them and you know, share the spotlight to help create
a rising tide for all of us, because it's only
going to work if we're all working together on this.
(09:38):
This is a live debate with a lot of the
gen Z activists that that I talked to not long ago.
We talked to Reneo Tera, who was featured in this
film Boy State, remarkable young activists who participated in this
program that was all about civic education and walked away
from it, drawing two conclusions. One, he really wants to
be involved in the world around him, and too, he
(09:58):
wants absolutely nothing to do with politics. I see something
a little bit different in your approach. But also during
the summer of response and reaction to the murder of
George Floyd, a lot of tension over the question of
whether you know voting and what happens at the ballot
boxes is kind of the right destination for a lot
of this activism. So I'm wondering how much have you
wrestled with that. Do you feel like there really is
(10:20):
a kind of debate with two sides or maybe something
more complicated going on? You know, how do we square
the importance of politics with the awareness that this is
not something the politics alone can fix. I think a
lot of the time, my kind of metaphor is that
we're trying to compare like an alan wrench. I guess
you could say that like a hammer when we have
really like we have a toolbox for social change making.
(10:42):
And in my opinion, it's like we we have. Yes,
there are times when like we have to protest, there
are times when we have to organize, there are times
when we have to lobby, there are times when we
have to heal and take care of ourselves. There's also
times where we have to vote. But I see all
these things is basically different tools that we can use
that try to pressure the system to get better over time.
(11:03):
And we can't leave out any one of those because
these communities across the country don't have an option for
their own survival of not to use one. You have
to get this change as quickly as possible because people
are dying on a daily basis. Let's say like protesting
and organizing at times might be like a hammer and
the crow bar that helps, you know, just bust open
the door of social change might be voting in combination
(11:27):
with you know, registering a lot of other people to vote,
but voting consistently to add that leverage on continuously over time.
It's not a or question like do you vote or
do you protest? It's an and question of like how
can we vote and how can we protest to create
this change as quickly as we needed to. But that's
how I kind of see it is, you know, we
just can't leave out any of these tools, and we
got to use everything that we can, and to leave
(11:48):
out voting especially you know, if I think back to
even like John Lewis is here who we talked with
right before the march, and his experience was voting and
how much they've had to to get that right. And
young people too, you know, eighteen year olds have not
had the right to vote since after the Vietnam War um,
and we have to use that right because there it's
(12:08):
it's not permitt We've seen time and time again, it
is so much easier to steam roll over the rights
of the people to be heard than it is to
open it up and enable everybody to be heard. So
you've been obviously very deeply involved and formed by activism
around common sense gun legislation, But I know from talking
to you that your mind ranges pretty far. What are
(12:29):
the issues command your attention right now, either as a
student in the things that you're being exposed to, or
in your life as an activist and advocate and citizen. UM.
I think one of them is realizing that, you know,
gun violence is an issue around bost but it's also
um it's a symptom of much bigger injustice, and we
need to address the reasons why young people are, especially
communities most impacted by systemic injustice, are picking up a
(12:52):
gun in the first place. It's a lack of opportunity.
You know, in my opinion, the reason why communities like
Parkland don't have shootings on a daily base. This isn't
because we have the most police, because we have the
most resources, right, And we need to realize that, especially
white people in this country, are a lot of uncomfortable
truths to uncover about the fact and privilege that you
know many of us have in the way that that
(13:15):
impacts other communities by starving them of resources a lot
of the time. But I think confronting the stystetically racist
history of our country, realizing that if we acknowledge the
kind of intolerance that we're expressed by, frankly, many of
our Founding fathers, that doesn't mean that we're anti American.
That means that we care about all Americans. We want
to build a better country for everyone right where everybody
(13:36):
is treated equally, and we're not just blindly following this
belief that frankly that all the Founding fathers were really
great people like they weren't. There there was a lot
of white nationalism that they expressed and talked about, and
that's uncomfortable for a lot of white people. We have
to confront those like incredibly dark truths. But I guess
looking at the way that injustice plays into it and
(13:57):
in place in the gun mounts as a whole, and
how we can build a a better country from that,
because I think of it kind of like Dr King
famously talked about three evils of society, and I would
add a fourth one to that. Really evils for militarism, poverty,
and racism. I would add environmental destruction to that with
climate change and everything. And I really see the level
of gun violence at a community faces, or an indigenous
(14:20):
nation faces, as a consequence of the level of injustice
that they've faced. That's why, for example, Indigenous nations have
the highest rate per capital, police brutality and group in
the country, and they have one of the highest suicide
rates in the countries because they faced incredible amounts of
at times the literal starvation um and also metaphorically speaking
to in terms of just a lack of resources. And
(14:41):
I think of the role that it's played in black communities,
especially that we're red lined in the nineteen thirties and forties,
in the way that that's impacted then the way that
the United States, you know, never actually paid reparations to
Black Americans. We've had these systems that have been built
around our current economic system that really are not meant
to rehabilitate people, never really have been, because they're founded
(15:01):
and rooted into systemic racism, like prison for example. And arguably,
you know, considerable amounts of our policing system that we
need to take a hard look at and figure out
how do we completely reimagine my being in public safety
so that everyone in every community is ketch stafe. That
makes me want to ask about something that I think
is so important in efforts to bring about change, which
is how you make it possible for people to get
(15:23):
through that discomfort and change right, How to make it
okay for people to change their mind. This was I
think a big part of what happened in my state
during the fight over equality under Mike Pence, for example,
when there was some really awful LGBTQ legislation, and I
saw the importance of giving people who were a little
bit whiplashed by change, maybe grew up very conservative, but
(15:45):
also we're guided by a sense of compassion or at
least questioning what they've been told, you know, giving them
a way to kind of beckon them onto what I've
viewed as the right side of history, versus trying to
drag them there. And with so much at stake, whether
it's around lgbt Q equality or racial justice or gun
violence or any of the issues we're talking about, I'm
sure you've seen efforts that backfire and efforts to succeed
(16:08):
in terms of creating that space for people. So what
have you learn about what it takes to make it
even possible for somebody to move, to change, to shift,
to grow. One of the best examples that I've seen
of that was when we talked to some of the
counter protesters, you know on tour that would show up
in our events armed to the teeth or whatever with
an a R fifteen or multiple hand guns and you know,
like a gun, a hand knife and you know, their
(16:29):
assault weapon, you know, strapped over their shoulder or whatever,
protesting and screaming that we were crisis actors that you know,
we're paid by George Sorrows. Also, that's not even the case,
Like I I It's been two and a half years
that I's done. You know, it's just crazy conspiracy game.
You're not gonna you're not making money off this. In
some of those cases, those people ended up actually being
(16:50):
really bad people. I didn't realize, for example, that some
of them were crowd boys that we're protesting us or
at times neo Nazis. But by talking to some of
the other people you know that we're out there, I
realized that, you know, in one conversation that I had
explaining that creating conference of gun laws doesn't mean taking
everyone's guns away, you know, and talking about why we
(17:10):
believe what we do. For example, the reason why the
shooter our high school was able in part to keep
his A R fifteen and legally own it um was
because he was able to legally buy an A R
fifteen he was you know, it's nineteen at the time
or whatever, he was under twenty one. You know, I've
talked to my dad about this, who's a former FBI agent,
and is a really interesting conversation to have the you know,
(17:32):
family member that's so you know, worked in law enforcement
for decades. You know, you can't even use those weapons
like inside of the house, if you're in a rate
or something, because a lot of the times, like if
you shoot that it's so powerful, it's gonna go through
the person and trying to shoot through a wall and
into some kids possibly in another room. Right, So what
are you actually doing like with that weapon and talking
about that and the fact that you know, even though
(17:52):
the shooter at our high school have made threats and stuff,
had signs of you know, possibly being dangerous, there's nothing
that could be done because was not a lot on
the books that could have taken his gun away through
due process, obviously didn't the right to counsel, because he
obviously shouldn't have had a fifteen in the first place.
If you're threatening to kill people and they're like, well,
I agree with that. You know, there were number of
areas where we didn't agreeve but overall they act a
(18:14):
lot of a few of them actually ended up crying
because they realized, like, you know, the hate that they
had was really misdirected, and that you know, we're human
beings too, and we just don't want kids to die anymore.
The difficult thing is those conversations can't only be had
by me or any one person. Is if you had
by all of us, it needs to be had with
our family members and have these uncomfortable conversations and explaining
(18:35):
why we believe what we believe and how we believe
this represents a better country for all of us, where
everyone can be equal and into the domestic tranquility in
every community. One other thing I wanted to ask you
about your student at Harvard. I remember my time there
about twenty years ago. I was there when nine eleven happened,
and I still find it a little bit disorienting to
speak to students who were born right around that time.
(18:58):
I wonder if you thought to the future twenty years
from now, when you might be encountering a student who
was born right around the time of the killings at Parkland,
and what would you hope that they would be working on.
If your generation delivers what needs to happen on gun violence,
what would you hope a future generation of activists would
(19:18):
be working on. You know, I think, first of all,
I hope that in the future we look back on
school shooter drills, for example, the same way that we
look back on, you know, air raide drills during the
Cold War as completely irrational things that really, you know,
we're trying to get citizens to protect themselves from when
really it should be the government like working to change
these things. And I hope that that person is working
(19:39):
towards figure out how how, especially with the advances in
technology that we've seen over the past century, how we
can make sure that everyday people have a fair disk
like distribution of the amount of work that they're putting
into these systems. Because I would rather have a country
where people have healthcare that's affordable and are able to
go to college and have a good job and have
(20:01):
their fair count of the effort that they put into
make this country one of the largest economies in the world. UM,
and they get their fair share of that. UM. I
would like to see our country become one that works
at prioritizing overall happiness for its people and you know,
peace and safety for them, an opportunity for anyone that
comes to ours fords to including immigrants. I think it
can get better. We just got to get a lot
more young people involved that try to promote human compassion
(20:24):
and decency and humility. Like so many, I am, of
course deeply impressed by David and his March for Our
Lives appears. It's not just what they've achieved at their age,
it's what they have achieved period. We can all look
to their work on gun violence prevention as a roadmap
for how to turn tragedy into a movement into action.
(20:46):
The reality is most Americans agree on things like background checks.
We can make this happen. But as David said, it's
not just gun violence and gun laws that we need
to tackle. The violence that we're seeing in this country
is part of a bigger pattern of injustice, racial socioeconomic,
and more so, we can't stop even if we round
the corner on gun legislation. I know that David Hogg
(21:08):
and March for Our Lives won't be stopping, and we
can continue looking to them for hope and more leadership.
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your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Pete godh Judge, and this is the deciding decade.
In spring, the gun reform organization Every Town came out
with the report that detailed gun violence in our country.
They found that every day, more than one Americans are
killed with guns and two hundred more are shot and wounded.
Our gun homicide rate is twenty five times that of
(00:28):
other high income countries. Firearms are the leading cause of
death for American children and teens. This issue has risen
to the forefront of American politics because of the mass
casualty events that have devastated our communities and the day
by day violence that commands less attention but destroys even
more lives. It's also getting attention because of the phenomenal
(00:48):
work that groups like every Town, Mom's Demand Action and
March for Our Lives have done. Because there is so
much work left to do, it's a great time to
have a conversation, and we're joined by one of the
lead ars who has been doing extraordinary work day in
and day at Today I'm joined by David Hogg, one
of the founders of March for Our Lives, an organization
dedicated to harnessing the power of young people across the
(01:11):
country to fight for sensible gun violence prevention policies that
save lives. In two thousand eighteen, David, then a senior
at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was
at school while a gunman with a semi automatic rifle
shot and killed seventeen people and injured seventeen others. It
was the deadliest high school shooting in US history. Since then,
in addition to starting March for Our Lives with his peers,
(01:34):
David has written a book with his sister called hashtag
Never Again, A Generation draws the Line, and he's dedicated
his time to fighting for gun legislation and other important causes.
Now a busy student at Harvard, he has already accomplished
so much and served as a leader of guide in
an inspiration to many. David, welcome, really glad to have
you than I want to begin just by asking about
(01:56):
your journey into activism, obviously born out of trauma, but
also I gather you were a very civically interested person
as a high school student. What was that moment of propulsion,
like when you saw a nation watching what had happened
to you and your peers? And saw that even as
(02:17):
a teenager, you had a tool kit that you could
use to help turn that into a moment that might
lead to a movement that would save lives. Yeah, I mean,
it was certainly an interesting moment. I think I realized that,
you know, certainly after I got home after the shooting
had happened, and my sister got home. She was a
freshman at the time, and she had lost four friends
(02:37):
that day. The unimaginable pain of that and the amount
of crying that I heard made me so physically and
emotionally uncomfortable. All that because for the first time in
my life, as my sister is, you know, big brother,
I couldn't do anything to make it better. So I
decided to do the only thing that I really knew
how to at the time. Because of my experience in
speech and debate and TV production, I knew that the
(02:58):
far too many mass shootings that we've had the country
typically don't last more than a week at most, you know,
in the media, and I didn't want I didn't just
want a bunch of talking heads going on you know,
CNN and Fox and stuff, debating random stuff without realizing
the human cost of these tragedies. So I decided to
go out there to speak for people like my sister
who couldn't at the time, um so that they would
(03:19):
be able to tell their truth and speak about it
when they were able to make their voice cured after
they're able to recover some you know, and to this day,
there's still many people understandably that haven't. You know, a
lot of us would probably never recover fully from it.
But that's kind of what it was like as I
realized that. You know, initially I went out there to
try to tell the story of what happened that day,
basically as a journalist, but I still realized that only
(03:41):
showing people doing cost of these things wasn't going to
be enough to actually change and try to prevent them.
Um So, after I got a text from a front
of mine, I met at his house with a bunch
of other people, and that's how, you know, we started
talking about doing a march in Washington where we thought
we would get about ninety people and ended up getting
just about a million. So one of the things I
really admired about what you built with March for Our
(04:02):
Lives is an attention to the fact that gun violences
every day. So there are these headline grabbing moments that,
let's face it, are more likely to involve more white
victims on average than the day to day gun violence
in so many cities and including my own, where the
victims are usually black and brown young men. And you
(04:23):
formed a coalition of people who had experienced every different
kind of gun violence with a lot of self awareness.
You talk about what that process was like and how
people with very different life experiences were able to come
together when their experiences of gun violence were also very
different as you look from mass shootings to what's unfolding
almost nightly in so many of our communities. Yeah, I
(04:46):
think that process of coalition building has been one of
the most transformative and educational experiences of my lifetime. It
showed me, especially, you know, coming from a community like Parkland,
growing up in a predominantly white suburbs of my entire life,
you know, I understand it that I didn't understand what
happens in North Miami or Liberty City, for example, to
refer it to South Florida or anywhere else in the
(05:07):
country that experiences gun violence. What we attempted to do
is come at it with the lens of humility and
understanding that you know, we don't know the work that
goes on there on a daily basis, We don't know
what happens with my friends of the South from West
Side of Chicago that worked with Grave youth leaders of St. Savannah.
One of the most important things that I've learned in
that process is that sometimes it's just as important as
(05:28):
a leader to be able to shut up and just
listen um and just hear people to understand what they've
gone through, because you're not going to get that from
the news, because these victims don't get in the news rarely,
if ever. And as a result of that, you have
to realize, like all of these communities are incredibly traumatized,
you know, and what's not going to save them is
the history of like the intertwining of white supremacy and
(05:51):
white statorship, where people like myself, for example, would come
from the suburbs oftentimes and say, here's what I'm gonna
do to save you and your community because of issues
that I'm inherently complicit in, such as white supremacy. You know,
I think for a lot of those people, myself included,
I'll admit at the beginning, like it makes uncomfortable because
work taught a history that is heavily propagandized in whitewash
(06:13):
about the history of white supremacy and its foundations in
this country. And I think, really, what I went in
that process where than anything, is don't go to people
and say here's what I'm gonna do for you, here's
how I'm gonna say. You're a community. You simply asked,
how can I be supportive of what you're doing in
a humble way, you know, And that's really what I've
what I've done. So being on national television puts a
(06:34):
lot of pressure on your humility. And one of the
things I think about a lot for you in your
generation of activists is you're young people. You're in college,
You're in a formative stage of your life right now,
and yet you also have a level of visibility that
a lot of your classmates may wind up working decades
to establish. How do you keep focus and how do
(06:57):
you think about what you've already established, this is what
you still need to cultivate just personally in order to
grow into the kind of citizen and leader and advocate
that you aim to be in the in the long run. Yeah,
I think it's it's certainly difficult because you know, most
nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenty year olds, you know, actually was
seventeen when it shouldn't happen. You know, most of us
(07:20):
don't have a million people or more seeing every mistake
that we make publicly. Um, and that's it's really difficult
because you know, in my opinion, a lot of learning
is just a series of mistakes that you've learned to
stop making over time. And I feel a certain responsibility
as a young person to admit to those mistakes when
I do make them. And another lesson that I would
say that I've learned through this process of learning how
(07:41):
to lead. By looking through really amazing mainly women actually
that are the predominant leaders and organizing I've seen get
very little, if any, of the credit a lot of
the time by looking to them, I've realized that one
of the most important things is a leader to do
is know that it's equally important to know that you're
right as it is to be able to admit when
you're wrong and be okay with that and learn how
to recover from that and have that validation of people
(08:03):
around you that expect you to learn along the way. UM.
And luckily I have a great family March for our Lives.
You know of activists and young people of all different
races and classes, um, you know from all over the
country that you know now really are some of the
best friends that I've ever made in my life that
are you know, helping me learn with that process, um,
and learning to call me in when I do mess up,
(08:23):
because I do, you know. UM. I think the other
thing too is realizing that the important thing is that
the work gets done, it's not so much the credit.
So one thing that I tried to do a lot
of the time is always try to get credit to
people that I think are really doing the work, because
it's never really just me at least in activism. Is
like there's a big problem with this like cloud of
thist stereotype within gen Z, which is this belief that
(08:44):
there's some activists that do this work because they want
credit on social media or they want to following, when
really that's the opposite of why you should be doing this,
Like you're doing this for other people. And what I
try to do just constantly shine credit to our team
and other organizations too. I think in the nonprofits racism.
You know, it's understandable that there are there's competition for funding,
but I think it's important to highlight the work that
(09:06):
especially being done and has been done before groups like
March for Olives were ever here in the first place,
in those predominantly black and brown communities, and and highlight
them and you know, share the spotlight to help create
a rising tide for all of us, because it's only
going to work if we're all working together on this.
(09:38):
This is a live debate with a lot of the
gen Z activists that that I talked to not long ago.
We talked to Reneo Tera, who was featured in this
film Boy State, remarkable young activists who participated in this
program that was all about civic education and walked away
from it, drawing two conclusions. One, he really wants to
be involved in the world around him, and too, he
(09:58):
wants absolutely nothing to do with politics. I see something
a little bit different in your approach. But also during
the summer of response and reaction to the murder of
George Floyd, a lot of tension over the question of
whether you know voting and what happens at the ballot
boxes is kind of the right destination for a lot
of this activism. So I'm wondering how much have you
wrestled with that. Do you feel like there really is
(10:20):
a kind of debate with two sides or maybe something
more complicated going on? You know, how do we square
the importance of politics with the awareness that this is
not something the politics alone can fix. I think a
lot of the time, my kind of metaphor is that
we're trying to compare like an alan wrench. I guess
you could say that like a hammer when we have
really like we have a toolbox for social change making.
(10:42):
And in my opinion, it's like we we have. Yes,
there are times when like we have to protest, there
are times when we have to organize, there are times
when we have to lobby, there are times when we
have to heal and take care of ourselves. There's also
times where we have to vote. But I see all
these things is basically different tools that we can use
that try to pressure the system to get better over time.
(11:03):
And we can't leave out any one of those because
these communities across the country don't have an option for
their own survival of not to use one. You have
to get this change as quickly as possible because people
are dying on a daily basis. Let's say like protesting
and organizing at times might be like a hammer and
the crow bar that helps, you know, just bust open
the door of social change might be voting in combination
(11:27):
with you know, registering a lot of other people to vote,
but voting consistently to add that leverage on continuously over time.
It's not a or question like do you vote or
do you protest? It's an and question of like how
can we vote and how can we protest to create
this change as quickly as we needed to. But that's
how I kind of see it is, you know, we
just can't leave out any of these tools, and we
got to use everything that we can, and to leave
(11:48):
out voting especially you know, if I think back to
even like John Lewis is here who we talked with
right before the march, and his experience was voting and
how much they've had to to get that right. And
young people too, you know, eighteen year olds have not
had the right to vote since after the Vietnam War um,
and we have to use that right because there it's
(12:08):
it's not permitt We've seen time and time again, it
is so much easier to steam roll over the rights
of the people to be heard than it is to
open it up and enable everybody to be heard. So
you've been obviously very deeply involved and formed by activism
around common sense gun legislation, But I know from talking
to you that your mind ranges pretty far. What are
(12:29):
the issues command your attention right now, either as a
student in the things that you're being exposed to, or
in your life as an activist and advocate and citizen. UM.
I think one of them is realizing that, you know,
gun violence is an issue around bost but it's also
um it's a symptom of much bigger injustice, and we
need to address the reasons why young people are, especially
communities most impacted by systemic injustice, are picking up a
(12:52):
gun in the first place. It's a lack of opportunity.
You know, in my opinion, the reason why communities like
Parkland don't have shootings on a daily base. This isn't
because we have the most police, because we have the
most resources, right, And we need to realize that, especially
white people in this country, are a lot of uncomfortable
truths to uncover about the fact and privilege that you
know many of us have in the way that that
(13:15):
impacts other communities by starving them of resources a lot
of the time. But I think confronting the stystetically racist
history of our country, realizing that if we acknowledge the
kind of intolerance that we're expressed by, frankly, many of
our Founding fathers, that doesn't mean that we're anti American.
That means that we care about all Americans. We want
to build a better country for everyone right where everybody
(13:36):
is treated equally, and we're not just blindly following this
belief that frankly that all the Founding fathers were really
great people like they weren't. There there was a lot
of white nationalism that they expressed and talked about, and
that's uncomfortable for a lot of white people. We have
to confront those like incredibly dark truths. But I guess
looking at the way that injustice plays into it and
(13:57):
in place in the gun mounts as a whole, and
how we can build a a better country from that,
because I think of it kind of like Dr King
famously talked about three evils of society, and I would
add a fourth one to that. Really evils for militarism, poverty,
and racism. I would add environmental destruction to that with
climate change and everything. And I really see the level
of gun violence at a community faces, or an indigenous
(14:20):
nation faces, as a consequence of the level of injustice
that they've faced. That's why, for example, Indigenous nations have
the highest rate per capital, police brutality and group in
the country, and they have one of the highest suicide
rates in the countries because they faced incredible amounts of
at times the literal starvation um and also metaphorically speaking
to in terms of just a lack of resources. And
(14:41):
I think of the role that it's played in black communities,
especially that we're red lined in the nineteen thirties and forties,
in the way that that's impacted then the way that
the United States, you know, never actually paid reparations to
Black Americans. We've had these systems that have been built
around our current economic system that really are not meant
to rehabilitate people, never really have been, because they're founded
(15:01):
and rooted into systemic racism, like prison for example. And arguably,
you know, considerable amounts of our policing system that we
need to take a hard look at and figure out
how do we completely reimagine my being in public safety
so that everyone in every community is ketch stafe. That
makes me want to ask about something that I think
is so important in efforts to bring about change, which
is how you make it possible for people to get
(15:23):
through that discomfort and change right, How to make it
okay for people to change their mind. This was I
think a big part of what happened in my state
during the fight over equality under Mike Pence, for example,
when there was some really awful LGBTQ legislation, and I
saw the importance of giving people who were a little
bit whiplashed by change, maybe grew up very conservative, but
(15:45):
also we're guided by a sense of compassion or at
least questioning what they've been told, you know, giving them
a way to kind of beckon them onto what I've
viewed as the right side of history, versus trying to
drag them there. And with so much at stake, whether
it's around lgbt Q equality or racial justice or gun
violence or any of the issues we're talking about, I'm
sure you've seen efforts that backfire and efforts to succeed
(16:08):
in terms of creating that space for people. So what
have you learn about what it takes to make it
even possible for somebody to move, to change, to shift,
to grow. One of the best examples that I've seen
of that was when we talked to some of the
counter protesters, you know on tour that would show up
in our events armed to the teeth or whatever with
an a R fifteen or multiple hand guns and you know,
like a gun, a hand knife and you know, their
(16:29):
assault weapon, you know, strapped over their shoulder or whatever,
protesting and screaming that we were crisis actors that you know,
we're paid by George Sorrows. Also, that's not even the case,
Like I I It's been two and a half years
that I's done. You know, it's just crazy conspiracy game.
You're not gonna you're not making money off this. In
some of those cases, those people ended up actually being
(16:50):
really bad people. I didn't realize, for example, that some
of them were crowd boys that we're protesting us or
at times neo Nazis. But by talking to some of
the other people you know that we're out there, I
realized that, you know, in one conversation that I had
explaining that creating conference of gun laws doesn't mean taking
everyone's guns away, you know, and talking about why we
(17:10):
believe what we do. For example, the reason why the
shooter our high school was able in part to keep
his A R fifteen and legally own it um was
because he was able to legally buy an A R
fifteen he was you know, it's nineteen at the time
or whatever, he was under twenty one. You know, I've
talked to my dad about this, who's a former FBI agent,
and is a really interesting conversation to have the you know,
(17:32):
family member that's so you know, worked in law enforcement
for decades. You know, you can't even use those weapons
like inside of the house, if you're in a rate
or something, because a lot of the times, like if
you shoot that it's so powerful, it's gonna go through
the person and trying to shoot through a wall and
into some kids possibly in another room. Right, So what
are you actually doing like with that weapon and talking
about that and the fact that you know, even though
(17:52):
the shooter at our high school have made threats and stuff,
had signs of you know, possibly being dangerous, there's nothing
that could be done because was not a lot on
the books that could have taken his gun away through
due process, obviously didn't the right to counsel, because he
obviously shouldn't have had a fifteen in the first place.
If you're threatening to kill people and they're like, well,
I agree with that. You know, there were number of
areas where we didn't agreeve but overall they act a
(18:14):
lot of a few of them actually ended up crying
because they realized, like, you know, the hate that they
had was really misdirected, and that you know, we're human
beings too, and we just don't want kids to die anymore.
The difficult thing is those conversations can't only be had
by me or any one person. Is if you had
by all of us, it needs to be had with
our family members and have these uncomfortable conversations and explaining
(18:35):
why we believe what we believe and how we believe
this represents a better country for all of us, where
everyone can be equal and into the domestic tranquility in
every community. One other thing I wanted to ask you
about your student at Harvard. I remember my time there
about twenty years ago. I was there when nine eleven happened,
and I still find it a little bit disorienting to
speak to students who were born right around that time.
(18:58):
I wonder if you thought to the future twenty years
from now, when you might be encountering a student who
was born right around the time of the killings at Parkland,
and what would you hope that they would be working on.
If your generation delivers what needs to happen on gun violence,
what would you hope a future generation of activists would
(19:18):
be working on. You know, I think, first of all,
I hope that in the future we look back on
school shooter drills, for example, the same way that we
look back on, you know, air raide drills during the
Cold War as completely irrational things that really, you know,
we're trying to get citizens to protect themselves from when
really it should be the government like working to change
these things. And I hope that that person is working
(19:39):
towards figure out how how, especially with the advances in
technology that we've seen over the past century, how we
can make sure that everyday people have a fair disk
like distribution of the amount of work that they're putting
into these systems. Because I would rather have a country
where people have healthcare that's affordable and are able to
go to college and have a good job and have
(20:01):
their fair count of the effort that they put into
make this country one of the largest economies in the world. UM,
and they get their fair share of that. UM. I
would like to see our country become one that works
at prioritizing overall happiness for its people and you know,
peace and safety for them, an opportunity for anyone that
comes to ours fords to including immigrants. I think it
can get better. We just got to get a lot
more young people involved that try to promote human compassion
(20:24):
and decency and humility. Like so many, I am, of
course deeply impressed by David and his March for Our
Lives appears. It's not just what they've achieved at their age,
it's what they have achieved period. We can all look
to their work on gun violence prevention as a roadmap
for how to turn tragedy into a movement into action.
(20:46):
The reality is most Americans agree on things like background checks.
We can make this happen. But as David said, it's
not just gun violence and gun laws that we need
to tackle. The violence that we're seeing in this country
is part of a bigger pattern of injustice, racial socioeconomic,
and more so, we can't stop even if we round
the corner on gun legislation. I know that David Hogg
(21:08):
and March for Our Lives won't be stopping, and we
can continue looking to them for hope and more leadership.
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