Teenagers are doing the impossible: keeping America’s attention on guns

Last updated Thursday, February 22, at noon

It’s been a week since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. And there’s something advocates and pundits have been saying about the way the national conversation has unfolded in the aftermath: It feels different from previous shootings.

Students who survived the shooting have been speaking out, organizing events, and demanding that leaders do something about US gun laws that allow people to easily obtain weapons and slaughter children inside American classrooms.

It’s a reaction to a mass shooting that we haven’t seen before.

But as someone who looks at a lot of data on media coverage, I’ve been skeptical of whether this story can persist in the public eye. That’s because, in shooting after shooting — whether it’s Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, or Las Vegas — our attention quickly moves off the topic and onto other subjects.

But there are signs that perhaps this one really is different:

The networks have covered gun control more than they did at the same point after Sandy Hook. We have seen a gradual shift from talking directly about the shooting to talking about policy solutions.

One thing that made the gun control debate persist after Sandy Hook was both the White House and congressional Democrats pushing gun control policy and keeping it in the news. The Orlando nightclub shooting also spurred two weeks of coverage on gun control, but it didn’t get that second wind from Congress or the White House.

With Parkland, however, it appears the students who survived the shooting are driving the attention onto gun control — and they’ve been able to keep America’s attention on the issue. We can see this in Google search data, which shows people are nearly as interested in searching “gun control” as they were just a few days after the shooting:

Mass shootings almost always dominate the news coverage on the days they happen, but those stories quickly die down and became a minuscule part of overall coverage. Even in the deadliest or most high-profile shootings, the coverage peaks the day after the shooting, stays relatively high for a day or two — and then fades into the background in a few weeks.

It looked like coverage of this shooting would fade quicker than most major shootings. But on Monday, after the weekend attention on FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of Russians who tried to interfere with the US election, coverage of the shooting came roaring back. Five days after the shooting, coverage of it was higher than it was at the same point after the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012. That attention waned a little on Tuesday and a bit more on Wednesday, but was still at relatively high levels.

And some of the diminishing coverage is being replaced by coverage on gun control.

The persisting media coverage, not just of the shooting but of gun control, is clearly bothering the gun lobby. Wayne Lapierre, head of the National Rifle Association, has accused the mainstream media and gun control advocates of using the tragedy to push their agenda.

So what does all this mean? It’s hard to say for sure, since virtually all previous evidence shows that the likeliest scenario is no action on guns.

But the data seems to suggest that hearing these young survivors not only plead for action, but taking action themselves, is keeping this conversation going. They’ve partnered with gun control advocates to organize events well into the future. And the students’ campaign may already be showing signs of having an effect: President Trump has directed the Department of Justice to ban bump stocks (which allow shooters to pull triggers more frequently and fire in rapid succession) and tweeted his support for strengthening background checks.

Will mobilization and public pressure lead to actual legislation? It will take a few more weeks, even months, before we know if this time really is different. But by keeping the shooting in the public’s attention, these Parkland high school students are giving gun control legislation its best chance since Sandy Hook.