Now that the smoke is beginning to clear and the dust beginning to settle from Saturday’s remarkable events, we get down to the nitty-gritty and try to figure out what comes next. Because if the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement doesn’t figure out how to build on this past weekend’s display of genuine interest and concern by millions of people who never previously thought about the issue of gun violence, an opportunity which I have never previously seen in my lifetime will have come and gone.

              I spent Saturday at a march in the toney, seaside town of Old Saybrook, where the organizers were expecting 500-600 people more or less, the cops ended up estimating the crowd at around 2,500, and there might have been even more. I spoke perhaps to 30-40 people, not one of them had ever previously been involved in any kind of activity dealing with guns. Not that these were hardcore gun owners, of course not; this is a wealthy town and the only hard-core you get around here are people whose trust funds together could probably pay off the national debt.

The point is that GVP activists and advocates have often felt themselves marginalized by the mainstream which gets concerned for a day or two when something really bad happens like Parkland or Sandy Hook, but then turn to other issues, allowing the NRA and the gun industry to define and set the terms of the debate. What was interesting this time was the degree to which the usual pro-gun noisemakers had little or nothing to say; the NRA rolled out a spiel from spokesman Colion Noir who pranced around but was basically ignored; the video of Emma Gonzalez allegedly tearing up the Constitution turned out to be a fake. Even Trump came back from hiding out in Florida and kept his mouth shut about what happened on the 24^th.

It turns out however, that the NRA hasn’t been particularly silent, they’ve just decided for the moment to follow the lead of the Parkland kids and promote themselves on social media, particularly Facebook, where they spent an average of $47,300 a day on advertising, up from a daily average of $11,300 before Parkland took place. The problem for the NRA however, is it doesn’t matter how much they spend, they don’t have a message that can reach anyone beyond the folks they always reach. And the way they reach their audience is to mix together the usual bromides about freedom, 2^nd-Amendment rights and protecting family and home with a nasty and shrill condemnation of the tree-huggers on the other side.

They were at it again last week with a series of video clips in which the usual NRA noisemakers (Loech, Stinchfield) discounted the impact of the demonstrations by running the usual ‘Bloomberg-Soros conspiracy’ up the flagpole and warning parents to avoid having anything to do with the ‘socialist’ efforts to brainwash their kids. Believe me, none of the people with whom I talked at the Old Saybrook march would be swayed by that kind of crap.

To Bloomberg’s credit, not only is he going out of his way to let everyone know that he’s putting his money on the line, but Everytown has just announced a million-dollar grant program to fund more “student driven advocacy” and spur more than 200 additional organizing events planned for the next couple of weeks. What the NRA doesn’t seem to realize is that demonizing Bloomberg doesn’t make a bit of difference to these kids and warning their parents about the evils intentions of gun-grabbers doesn’t fly at all.

The reason the NRA’s Eddie Eagle isn’t flying so high is very simple; a bunch of high school kids took advantage of funding from people like Bloomberg and showed everyone that you can’t sell violence by pretending that violence can be used to achieve good end. ‘Guns don’t kill people’ doesn’t work when a shooter walks into a high school with a loaded gun. The Parkland kids had no trouble figuring that one out.