A year after the massacre of 14 high-school students, what has changed?

By M.S.R. | WASHINGTON, DC

PUBLIC REACTION to school shootings in America follows a familiar pattern: an outpouring of grief and revulsion is followed by demands for stricter gun laws, which peter out in the face of implacable resistance from pro-gun politicians. But that pattern was interrupted after a teenager walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on February 14th last year with a semiautomatic rifle and killed 14 students and three teachers.

The response of the student-survivors of Parkland, who poured their pain and fury into a new campaign for gun control, kept the tragedy in the news for much longer than usual. And the vast March for our Lives network their campaign spawned, with its explicit focus on political registration and participation, has kept it there, as media coverage of the one-year anniversary of the Parkland shooting this week shows. What else has the newly energised movement for gun control achieved?