David Hogg, Ryan Deitsch, and Cameron Kasky are founding members of the Never Again movement, a response to the February shooting at their high school in Parkland, Florida. They are now traveling the country with other students from their school to advocate for gun law reform.
Harvard Political Review: How much did you know about gun laws before this shooting?
David Hogg: I would say more than your average high school student. I watched a lot of John Oliver and The Daily Show, and I debated this stuff for the past four years in speech and debate and public forum. I knew somewhat about this stuff because my dad was an FBI agent and we talked about [it] a lot around my house. My family was never a family to eat dinner at the dinner table. We just sat around and watched the news 24/7. I grew up in a household watching 60 Minutes ever since I can remember.
Ryan Deitsch: Similar situation to David. I have been watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart since I was eight years old. Should an eight year old have been watching Comedy Central that late at night? Who knows? But what really matters is that I learned all of these things mostly through political satire. There is always truth in comedy. If you can make somebody laugh and you can make someone cry, you can tell pretty much any story on earth. It is just that simple.
With gun laws, I learn it bit by bit as I go. Every single meeting I have and every single person I talk to, I learn something new. If I wanted to Google it for hours I could, and I do sometimes, but the best experience is to speak to lawmakers, speaking to the people who are changing these laws. And it is shameful to see the people who do not want to take action, but they will talk about it to a certain extent. They will talk about what is already on the books, and we have learned so much. Like the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] paper trail. How they cannot digitize any gun sale records and the CDC [Center for Disease Control] research ban where they cannot fund any research on gun violence.
Cameron Kasky: And the Dickey Amendment. I have been trying to get involved since day one. I was at my first Obama rally when I was seven years old. I always watch the news. I always listen to the people around me. I like to hear the opposition because I like shutting it down. But with regard to specific gun laws, I knew that there was a problem, and I knew that these high capacity rifles were being sold very easily. I knew that was a problem.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, the specifics, I have only just recently been learning. But being around David, who is just a beautiful walking bag of facts, makes it a lot easier. Being able to work with these lawmakers, who have watched the system fail them, we have learned so much. It is something we should not have to learn about. We are in a position we should not be in, but we are doing everything we can with it.
HPR: Recent news coverage has described your activism as groundbreaking because you are old enough to speak for yourselves, but the victims and survivors in Las Vegas and San Bernardino were also old enough to speak for themselves. What was different in your case that spurred such a well-formed and active movement?
Cameron: With Las Vegas specifically, that concert was a melting pot. It had people from all over, and they were not a community. But we were a town. Almost all of us knew each other before all of this. We were bound together very quickly by the same tragedy. We knew the people we lost. Unfortunately, one of the main reasons that this has been covered so closely is that we are an affluent white community. We have to not feel guilty because of that, and, instead, we have to take our spotlight and make sure that it shines on everyone who has to deal with this, in all communities.
HPR: It has been 34 days since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. How can we keep the media and politicians’ attention on gun reform when the news cycle moves on so quickly?
Cameron: I have one sentence: Do not let them off the hook.
Ryan: We were just speaking with students from the Boston/Cambridge area, and they were talking about how they protested in front of Smith & Wesson. They only had about 100 kids, but they are informing people, and they said that they will go back in 30 days if the gun manufacturers will not meet with these students. Smith & Wesson is the manufacturer that created the gun that was used in the Parkland shooting. They created the guns that are used on the streets of Chicago and the streets of Boston. They are creating these weapons. It is the same thing as the cigarette companies. They are creating these products that are not meant to help the public. They are a threat to public safety, so we have to sit down with them. We have to keep talking.
Yes, it has only been 34 days, but there are people who have been in this fight for decades. There are people I have met who have said, “This is your Vietnam.” But they still fought against guns when they were fighting against Vietnam. We are not special; we are not better than anyone else. We are just using what we were given. We are using all of the pieces of this puzzle; we are putting it together to create something beautiful.
David: I think that the way we keep this in the news is with some of the new student clubs we are going to be starting. We need to continue having these protests. Each month, we are going to have a different goal. For example, we are going to have all of the student clubs in one state go to the state capital that month. The next time, it will be “everybody make sure you go out and vote during midterms.”
It is also important to remember that anger is good at getting things started, but it is not good at getting things done. Anger is our adrenalin, but love and compassion are our stamina. We have to remember that. We can only be angry for so long, because it is emotionally exhausting, while love and compassion are emotionally empowering.
Ryan: The march is this Saturday. It is on seven continents on this planet. It is going to happen pretty much everywhere. There are over 800 sister marches, so if you cannot make it to Washington, there is one in Boston. There is one that Harvard students are helping to run, there is one that Boston high schoolers are helping to run. Even after the march, we are not going away. We are not going to shut up. We have this voice and we are going to use it. This country is ‘by the people, for the people,’ and people are being ignored. We are going to show them that we are not going to take it.
[After the interview concluded, David asked the HPR if he could add a concluding remark.]
David: One last thing. It is important to realize that the one thing the NRA is gaining on now is our generation moving on and forgetting. We cannot let that happen, but we will let that happen if we continue only to be angry. We have to learn to be loving and compassionate to our fellow Americans, regardless of their opinions. The second they attack you and you are trying to just love them, it proves that they are immature. It is through love and compassion that we have changed the pace of America before, and it is how we are going to change it again.
Image Credit: Harvard Political Review/Sarah Tisdall
This interview has been edited and condensed.