Remember the Parkland massacre earlier this year when 17 students and teachers were killed in yet another senseless episode that highlights how wrong the American second amendment is?
Remember the passionate speeches and how a whole group of young people started organising themselves and started to get political? And give speeches like this one?
And how they organised and urged all young people to get out and vote?
Well I can’t help but wonder what effect they had on the midterm election results. Because it appears that youth voting went through the roof.
And NRA endorsed candidates did not do very well.
From the article:
Democrats say they will pass the most aggressive gun-control legislation in decades when they become the House majority in January, plans they renewed this week in the aftermath of a mass killing in a California bar.
Their efforts will be spurred by an incoming class of pro-gun-control lawmakers who scored big in Tuesday’s midterm elections, although any measure would likely meet stiff resistance in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Democrats ousted at least 15 House Republicans with “A” National Rifle Association ratings, while the candidates elected to replace them all scored an “F” NRA rating.
“This new majority is not going to be afraid of our shadow,” said Mike Thompson, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. “We know that we’ve been elected to do a job, and we’re going to do it.”
For at least one of the candidates this was personal. Again from the WSJ:
The highest-profile gun-control advocate on the ballot Tuesday was Democrat Lucy McBath, who defeated GOP Rep. Karen Handel in a suburban Atlanta House contest. Ms. McBath, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant, became a gun-control advocate after her teenage son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed in 2012 by a man who said the boy was playing music too loud. The assailant was later convicted of murder.
Of course it is simplistic to attribute all credit for this result to March for our lives and associated movements. Campaign finance played a significant part:
The gun-rights advocacy group [NRA] spent about $20 million in the 2018 election cycle—much of it on advertising backing the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said.
Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun-control organization backed by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a group founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically wounded in a 2011 shooting, spent a combined $37 million in 2018.
But Gonzales and co should take a bow for turning the dominant American ethos around and for helping to make people with strong anti gun beliefs electable.
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