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.”

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.