What Happened to the Young Voters Focused on Guns?

March for Our Lives has established partnerships with older organizations like the longstanding Brady Campaign as well as Black community-based groups like the Community Justice Action Fund. In April, March for Our Lives joined a number of other youth-led groups, including the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, in writing a letter to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign demanding action on a range of progressive policies.

On Monday evening in El Paso, the local March for Our Lives chapter plans to convene a vigil at the site of last year’s massacre, with participation from other local groups. The next day, young organizers with the nearby Houston chapter will gather alongside representatives from racial-justice organizations and other activist groups to promote a City Council bill proposed by the council member Letitia Plummer that would reallocate funding away from the Houston Police Department and toward social programs.

A year after the Parkland shooting, with Democrats enjoying a newly strengthened majority in the House, young adults remained more likely than older Americans to say that gun control legislation should be an immediate priority for Congress, with half of respondents under 30 saying so, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll.

In that survey, conducted in February 2019, two-thirds of those under 30 said that they prioritized strengthening gun laws over preserving the rights of firearm owners — a heavier gun-control tilt than in any other age group. Young adults were also the only age group to have a majority unfavorable opinion of the National Rifle Association, according to the poll.

When the massacre in El Paso took place, the Democratic presidential race was just beginning to heat up, and gun control again appeared poised to become a central focus.

The presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who had spent six years representing El Paso in Congress, suspended his campaign and visited the site of the shooting. During a presidential debate a month later, he pledged to put in place a national gun registry and a mandatory buyback program for assault rifles, declaring: “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

But today, with a different youth-protest movement sweeping the country, millennials and young adults in Generation Z are more likely to explicitly name racial justice as their top political concern. A Fox News poll last month found that voters under 30 were three times as likely as those 45 and over to call race-related issues their No. 1 policy priority. Just three percent of the youngest voters named gun violence as their top concern.