Hours after a young man walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14 with an AR-15 rifle, a black duffel bag, and backpack loaded with magazine cartridges, Jaclyn Corin took it upon herself to share the enormity of her experience in the way she knew how. She had spent over three hours captive in the school, and had once even tutored the young man who took 17 peoples’ lives that day. Shortly after staggering home, she turned to social media, where friends were sharing intimate accounts of their horror. Within hours, the #NeverAgain hashtag had become a global phenomenon. “Please pray for my school,” Corin began her Facebook and Instagram posts. She worked up toward a passionate call for strict gun regulation. “We NEED to work together to bring change,” she concluded. “MAKE IT STOP.”
Corin, 17, is a petite blonde young woman with fair skin, flowing hair, and a soprano voice that doesn’t carry in crowds. But she has a presence. She is junior class president at M.S.D. and was previously vice president her freshman year. The commitment forced her to give up dance class after 13 rapturous years. (“Dance was my life and my love,” she said.) Weeks before the shooting, she was planning a nursing career. But an urgency awakened in her that afternoon. Corin would soon learn that her friend Cameron Kasky was in the early stages of planning a march on Washington to take place in March. Corin feared, however, that the undertaking would require weeks of planning and organization, and that the Douglas story would subsequently fade into the background. “The news forgets,” she recalled to me recently. “Very quickly. And if we were all talk and no action, people wouldn’t take us as seriously. We needed a critical mass event.”
Corin began to realize her wish the next day. A family friend forwarded her Facebook post to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who met her at a vigil, and connected Corin to her state senator, Lauren Book, soon thereafter. Corin began to conjure a vision for striking fast while the story remained in the news cycle, and agitating for meaningful legislative change: she pictured waves of students from multiple schools descending on the state capitol in Tallahassee. But the organizational hurdles appeared overwhelming. And it would take way too long. So she settled on a lightning strike. Corin would recruit a couple hundred students from M.S.D., bus them eight hours to Tallahassee on Tuesday and help them lobby for new gun laws. Book signaled that she was ready to help make it happen.
Corin was beginning to map it out Friday night, when Kasky called at 9:30, past her normal bedtime. The two friends had weathered the attack together. Kasky had just swung by her classroom to pick up his autistic brother, Holden. After hours in lockdown, the SWAT team suddenly busted in, shattering the glass in the door. Five hulking men barked orders and pointed assault weapons. It was terrifying, Corin recalled, but she was most afraid for some of the autistic kids who didn’t comprehend and were not complying. “If they had made a wrong move, who knows,” Corin said.
Kasky wasn’t calling to relive the event. Instead, he asked her to come over, where he told her about his bold plan and enlisted her help in the March for Our Lives in Washington later this month. He was stunned to discover, however, that she was already engineering her own rapid deployment team to Tallahassee, and they joined forces. The following morning, they met fellow students David Hogg and Emma González at the rally where her “We call B.S.” speech went viral, and they all joined forces in #NeverAgain. Meanwhile, Corin spread the word about her demonstration by text and social media, and volunteers swarmed in. “I texted her that 100 percent count me in,” Jensen Clark, a fellow junior who has danced with Corin for years, told me.
It was tempting to keep expanding, but Corin wanted buses rolling in two days without any organizational hiccups, and the logistics were already complex. She had to transport, feed, house, and chaperone a hundred minors some 450 miles. She also had to convince top state officials to meet them upon arrival, or else the whole affair would have seemed like a media stunt. So Corin began delegating. State Senator Book set her staff in motion, hiring three jumbo coach buses, arranging meals, and slotting in meetings. (Book worked the phones all weekend to assemble colleagues in the state house to meet the kids. The attorney general consented. Governor Rick Scott, a strident N.R.A. supporter, was noncommittal.) Florida State University agreed to provide space nearby for the kids to sleep, Uber Eats donated dinner, and individuals covered other meals. The Red Cross would come through with cots. Book insisted on paying the $10,000 to rent the three jumbo coach buses personally, not out of campaign funds. “Lauren understood how taking action in the wake of something so traumatic can really help your healing,” Claire VanSusteren, her aide, told me. Book had survived sexual abuse beginning at age 11, and her fight for victim rights drove her entry into politics. “Taking action, leading marches, getting laws changed, and using her voice to create this change was what helped Lauren transition from victim to thriving survivor,” VanSusteren said.
Corin pictured the Douglas students convening with the lawmakers en masse, in some sort of gallery, but Book and VanSusteren suggested breaking the students into 10 groups of 10, for more intimate meetings where they could really engage. Book sent her a profile on each official—concerns, interests, and personality—and Corin matched the appropriate students, pairing “strong students with hardheaded legislators,” and so forth. There was a flood of texts and seemingly endless responses to queries from students, and working out the kinks with Book was intimidating. “I was terrified,” Corin recalled. “I’m a 17-year-old calling a Florida state senator. That’s just not normal.” But Book and VanSusteren quickly put her at ease. “They made jokes with me,” Corin said. “It was touching to know that they had the same humor and they were just humans like I was.”
They talked a lot about attire. Many kids expected to dress up. That felt all wrong. The purpose of the trip was giving voice to high-school students, so they should look like students and speak like students. Jeans and T-shirts, Corin told her recruits—no suits. Pack light, she advised: just toiletries, fresh T-shirts, sleeping bag, and air mattress—the cots had not yet come through. The biggest challenge, however, was the parents. Many feared P.T.S.D. and were leery of a long trek with sleeping bags to lie on floors led by a high-school kid. That took some convincing to get their signatures on three separate release forms—hours and hours all weekend.
Corin and her team also recognized, on some level, that they were engaged in a race against time. In between funerals, they could focus on fomenting change as though it were their full-time occupation. But they were high-school students. Word had not come down regarding when school would re-open. After most major shootings, class had reconvened in two weeks or less. They had no time to waste.
The buses were set to roll Tuesday, February 20, at 1 P.M., outside the Publix store—“the one by the Walmart,” Corin clarified during a mandatory meeting the night before. Excitement was bubbling. Kasky helped juice the crowd, which had swelled to hundreds with parents, onlookers, and media. Three bus engines lumbered noisily, and a helicopter buzzed overhead. They had no megaphone, no way for people to hear. They needed a Plan B. Something fast. “Let’s hop on a car,” he said.
“You’re joking, right?”
While she was besieged by kids and moms approaching with last-minute concerns, Kasky had found the owner of a big black SUV, and was now clambering onto the roof. Corin followed him up. “I was terrified,” she recalled “But whatever.”
Kasky is a natural speaker and threw his whole body into his delivery. Then Corin called out the group assignments, a hundred names. As she stepped down to the asphalt, Corin was besieged with last-minute issues, and some unexpected management headaches. Lots of kids wanted to switch groups, for instance, to sit with friends. It was an eight-hour drive, and they were teenagers. Corin put her foot down. “No,” she said. “Get on your bus.” There were dozens of cameras and phones trained on her, and every minor confrontation was recorded. Corin told me later that the ubiquity of the media was incredibly scary at first, but that she got used to it quickly, and just did what she needed, quit noticing. She granted no interviews.
A slew of last-minute obstacles delayed departure nearly an hour. One of the bus drivers demanded they pay for his Tallahassee hotel room. “I kind of had a breakdown,” Corin told me later. “He got out of the bus and started walking away. I was a mess, I was crying. I have so much pressure on my shoulders—you cannot be doing this!” Corin ended up lagging behind most of her own volunteer brigade. A/C broke down on her bus before they left the parking lot. A replacement was dispatched, putting them an hour behind the already-late first two buses, and the big media caravan following them. “It really flattened the mood,” Corin said.
In the three days I spent with Corin, however, she betrayed no signs of breaking down. She was frequently harried, pulled in competing directions, but exuded quiet calm. Corin can’t escape grief, though. She described painful moments for me: always sudden, unexpected—a stray memory, a car running over a water bottle to produce a bang—where pain or fear crested over this young girl and she crumbled and sobbed.
On the road, the mood on the other buses was subdued, with a gentle undercurrent of electricity. Jensen Clark said she was there “to make a change in the entire world. With gun laws, mental health laws—so we never see this again.” The students were excited to meet their representatives, but fuzzy on what that would look like, or what they should say. The Douglas story had taken over the centrality of the global news cycle, with the days of wall-to-wall coverage on cable news and social media, and they were taken aback by the whirlwind. “I don’t think any of us starting this movement thought it would get this big so quickly,” freshman Daniel Duff said. “It’s crazy that I’ll never be able to hang out with my friend Cameron, without people coming up and saying, “Oh my God, you’re Cameron Kasky!’”
Corin told me that the magnitude of the vortex began to dawn on her the day before they set out for Tallahassee. “I always used to Google my name, and nothing would come up,” she said. And now when she just types in her first name, Google suggests her and YouTube sensation Jaclyn Hill.
It was a long, wearying ride with lots of bladder issues and multiple rest stops. The lead bus finally pulled into the Leon High School lot, blocks from the capitol building, and the doors opened to rapturous applause. A huge crowd of Leon students covered the ridge line up to the building. Each student stepped off the bus into a hug brigade of Leon school officials. Duff wasn’t sure who was hugging him. But he was overcome. “I didn’t know that we were that big,” he said. All those kids staying at school till 10 o’clock “to meet some kids who have a voice.”
Several Douglas students revved their peers up with impassioned short speeches at the top of the steps. The speakers went out almost immediately, but were fixed for the second bus, where the whole process repeated. By the time the third bus limped in, the Leon kids were sharing pizza with the first two groups. Corin and her friends got hugs and brief applause, and were ushered inside.
It was late, but the legislative training went forward. It was vital. It’s O.K. to be emotional with officials, VanSusteren cautioned, but if you get angry or contentious, meetings will be canceled fast. Several speakers repeated her warning, but Rep. Jared Moskowitz went a different route. “You need to make this real for them,” he said. “You’ve got to put them in that school.”
“You are the epicenter of the earth right now,” Sen. Book said. “You are what is going to change the world. And the most important thing is that we not let people look away!” Duff was relieved to hear all that. He had been pretty unclear on how to act. He wasn’t quite 15 years old.
State Senator Book and VanSusteren spent the night with the girls, in sleeping bags on the Red Cross cots. Conversation bounced between normal teen topics, speeches they were planning, and reliving the shooting. Some were reconnecting or sharing stories for the first time. “After 3 o’clock, I could not stay up one more minute,” VanSusteren told me. She suggested everyone get some sleep. “The kids said, ‘We don’t really sleep anymore,’” she said. She shuddered. Then she went to sleep. At 5 A.M., the doors swung open for the Good Morning America crew.
They walked to the capitol groggy, but exhilarated. But disillusionment crept in fast. Students told me that gun-rights hard-liners seemed intent on merely placating them. “Thoughts and prayers”—they hate that. Most groups experienced the opposite problem. “For the most part, the people we talked to already agreed with us,” Daniel Duff said. “We really didn’t have anything to persuade them.” Officials insisted most meetings be closed to media, but Senate President Joe Negron opened his session with two other Republican senators. He answered every question, without condescension, but was generally evasive. “Why should anyone have an assault rifle?” a boy asked. “That’s an issue that we’re reviewing,” Negron said. The students groaned.
One student asked for a simple yes or no answer on raising the purchasing age of an assault rifle to to 21, and Negron offered a long-winded dodge. The grumbling grew louder. Then Senator Bill Galvano poked his head to the microphone and said simply, “My answer is yes.” Applause broke out and shouts of “Thank you! Thank you!” Senator Negron called on junior Alfonso Calderón, one of the leaders of the movement. “You said you would look at things closely,” Calder´ón said. “Are you willing to actually act on anything?—yes or no?” Senator Negron gave long answers, saying he was proud of the senate and they were working on mental health.
The sour mood curdled all morning, erupted in angry noon speeches and then worsened through the afternoon. Corin continued fielding problems and herding strays, but shied away from the limelight. The View was about to tape a remote segment from Book’s office, and a producer begged Corin to come on. She shook her head, and three other students went on instead. Corin conferred with Book, and savored a few minutes of downtime, playing with Book’s giggly twin one-year-olds in miniature, drool-soaked DOUGLAS STRONG T-shirts. They briefly defused the pressure and reminded Corin who they were fighting for. Her peers are unlikely to face another gunman, but how long would this blight persist? Would it threaten the generation of toddlers crawling around under a Senate Babies sign and bouncing merrily on student laps? The goal of their journey wasn’t simply to change lawmakers’ minds in a single day, but create a path for long-term change. And the Parkland teens had done just that.
Shortly before they headed home, smiles began reappearing. Governor Scott had agreed to two hours of meetings and kids were rotating in and out in small groups. Many described him listening, responding and asking probing questions. “I feel like he really heard us,” sophomore Tanzil Philip said. “I sat right next to him and he was writing down everything we were talking about and he put checkmarks next to the things that were really important to us.” That contrasted with the legislators, “sending thoughts and prayers,” he said. “That makes me cringe."
There were many dissenters, with some groups complaining Scott never even uttered the words “gun control.” Governor Scott, who has an A-plus rating from the N.R.A., would eventually propose banning bump stocks and raising the legal age to buy assault rifles three years, to 21. This week, his Republican-controlled state senate passed a bill including those measures and added a three-day waiting period for most gun purchases. But the lawmakers also infuriated students by adding a provision to allow some staff to carry concealed weapons. The House was set to vote on its version of the bill late Wednesday. Governor Scott’s proposals had been widely discussed on the trip and most students derided them as minor no-brainers. The country would still be awash in guns; a tiny fraction of attackers would just have to work a little harder to get a certain deadly type. “Some people know the baloney that politicians feed us,” Corin said.
Still, she acknowledged that they had expected only incremental movement, if any. Many said they would be happy with a first step, any step, to reclaim momentum after losing it for decades—their entire lives. Everyone seemed glad they came. “Oh, a hundred percent,” Duff said. Next up, he looked forward to organizing the march, but possibly attending a local one. “I haven’t talked to my parents about that.” They boarded the buses exhausted, and arrived home around 4 A.M. A car was already waiting in front of Corin’s house. After a quick snooze, it whisked Corin and her mother to the airport to appear on Ellen.
Corin was right. The news forgets. A week after Tallahassee, the Douglas story began to fade from the news cycle, replaced by the Robert Mueller probe, the latest shenanigans involving Jared Kushner, Hope Hicks’s white lies, the Academy Awards, Stormy Daniels, tariffs, Sam Nunberg, and Gary Cohn. I asked some of the kids how they felt about that and they were almost surprised by the question. The media is second nature to these kids, and they weren’t expecting to lead the news indefinitely. “It’s fading a little, but not to the point people are forgetting,” Corin said. “They know our message.” Their strategy, she explained, was to punch a hole through the gun-safety defeatism, recast the debate, and keep making noise this spring with powerful demonstrations. “It’s all leading up to the march,” Corin said. “Media trucks aren’t lining our streets anymore, but people keep asking us for interviews. But we keep declining them. We don’t want to over-saturate the media. We don’t want people to get ‘Oh, I’m sick and tired of these kids. So annoying.’ And we also have school.”
Even back at school, they were moving forward with their agenda. Duff’s parents had assented to his request to march in Washington, and he couldn’t have been more excited. Corin recently went to Washington to meet with Chris Murphy, Connecticut’s junior senator, who became a visible gun-control supporter in the wake of Newtown; former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; and civil-rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who famously crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge at 25, just a few years older than Corin. “We’re getting such outreach from such influential people in history that I’ve literally read about in my textbooks,” she said. “It’s surreal and unbelievable.” She continued: “I think people are scared to make such a big change. Even though maybe their moral compass is saying it’s right. Just like the civil-rights movement took years, this is going to take years.”
Corin has no idea what those years will look like, but she plans to be part of it. Next year, she wants to run for senior-class president, to lead her class through the next phase of this, whatever that turns out to be. Three weeks ago, she was planning to be a nurse. Now she’s thinking about politics. “Seeing that I have such a powerful voice,” she said. “Older people—they’re listening to me. I didn’t know I had this powerful voice—that I could use for good.”
I have followed school shootings since Columbine, nearly 19 years ago, and I’ve never seen anything like the #NeverAgain kids. I swore I’d never go back to another of these crime scenes, to report another story of misery and horror. I went to Douglas because it’s radically different this time. The Douglas kids seized their destiny on day one and willed it into a story of astonishing hope and drastic change.
These students succeeded, in some ways, where their predecessors had come up short. Their efforts taught us that it’s not about the body count, it’s not even the horror of the catastrophe, as everyone assumed after Newtown. (If dead 6-year-olds can’t do it . . .) In reality, it’s about the messenger. It’s about the right people with the right standing, in the right moment, just picking up the ball and running with it.
In retrospect it’s so clear that Barack Obama and his Congress were doomed after Newtown, because they appointed themselves to lead the gun fight. Politicians are no longer our leaders. We still require them to pass the bills, but we look for others to believe in. These days, we are all so starved for truth—a hunger that, in some ways, explains the rise of Donald Trump—that we naturally gravitate to those who audaciously call bullshit on all the lies. The Parkland kids were hunted, ran for their lives, again, and then called B.S., literally, on the big deadly lie that we can’t allow hunting and still protect our kids. These kids are so media savvy, but their playbook is so simple. Tell the truth, the whole truth—not some sanitized, poll-tested talking points to sound reassuring but avoid the hard realities and adroitly answer a completely different question than was asked.
What comes next, though, is uncertain. In advance of the midterms, these students need to demonstrate the scope and power of this movement with a massive march. They need to keep firing up the momentum and driving it into the heart of the midterm debate. Their fight will be won or lost long before election day. Exit polls may demonstrate that people really voted on guns this time, but they will be far too late. To move politicians, guns have to be central to this election debate. If politicians from both sides duck the gun issue, again, the game is lost. Keep them talking, and the name of this NeverAgain movement has a shot at becoming true.
