Students marching for their lives are marching for the rest of America Our latest survey data shows that students marching for their lives mirror the nation's desire for increased gun control.

Sarah Saxton | Opinion contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption March for Our Lives 'isn’t a political rally' More than 1 million people are expected to attend the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. hoping for changes to gun regulations and school safety.

Eleven years ago next month, I was in the student government office at Virginia Tech when the shooting that would claim 33 lives, including the shooter's, began across campus. My classmates and I felt the sickening horror of not knowing if our friends were alive as we watched the terror occurring in our quiet, close-knit community unfold on the news. In the wake of that life-changing day, we garnered strength from the naïve hope that swift change would occur to prevent others from experiencing what we went through.

We were wrong.

Shamefully, this is a modern horror young people in America increasingly fear and too often experience. This week, young people will gather in Washington D.C. and around the country to march for their lives because the social media-savvy “mass shooting generation,” as some Parkland students have self-labeled, has had #enough. Many were born after Columbine, coming of age after the tragedy at my alma mater, and they are no longer waiting for leaders to come around to change. They are marching to compel action that will protect Americans from mass shootings and gun violence. But the thing is, America already agrees with them.

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I’ve recently joined the opinion research company, Ipsos, where my colleagues have conducted extensive research on American perspectives of gun violence over the past several months — months that have represented a paradigm shift in how Americans are talking about guns — including the results of a survey of the mass shooting generation (13 to 24 year olds) recently featured in USA TODAY. Additionally, we have polled on shifting gun-related attitudes over time and support for myriad proposed measures to curb gun violence among gun owners, young people, and the public at large. Our research shows that Americans don’t actually need convincing, they already agree that we should embrace common sense gun control measures.

Organizers of the March For Our Lives have a simple message: We don’t want to be shot at school. A self-evident truth in any other industrialized country, yet some have claimed the young people driving the March are motivated by a partisan agenda. After all, the quick shift to policy discussion after recent mass shootings contrasts with our inward, community-recovering focus 11 years ago. However, the survey we recently conducted among this generation shows this is not true.

Particularly among the school-aged 13 to 17 year olds, clear majorities from both political sides favor policies like securing schools with metal detectors, preventing people with mental illness from owning a firearm, or banning the AR-15. Far from being partisan poker chips, this generation has found a bipartisan platform of their own.

People often remark resignedly about how the gun debate is stuck with no movement after decades of mass shootings. But a recent pair of Ipsos/NPR surveys, conducted after the Las Vegas shooting and then after the Parkland shooting, found that American opinions have indeed moved — towards supporting gun control measures. In the last 6 months, the number of Americans favoring stricter gun laws has climbed to 75%, up 7% from the 68% we saw after Vegas.

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Included in this desire for change are perhaps the biggest stakeholders in tightened restrictions, gun owners. According to a recent BuzzFeed News/Ipsos survey, despite a broad appreciation for the Second Amendment, most gun owners believe in a measure of governmental responsibility that does not seem to be represented by the most prominent gun advocates. Indeed, the NRA may not be as representative as once thought — one in four gun owners believe the NRA means well, but sometimes goes too far, and an equal number of gun owners say the NRA does not reflect their beliefs or interests.

We find ourselves in a situation where public opinion is coalescing around support for gun control, while the frequency of mass casualty events has increased in the 11 years since I experienced this American nightmare first-hand. So is the “mass shooting generation” finally at a breaking point? Is this moment different?

Our data and analysis at Ipsos points to two key factors as to why it might be: First, young Americans have lost faith in their leaders to do the job on their behalf; two-thirds of young people say the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful and over half say traditional parties and politicians don't care about people like them, according to our latest USA TODAY data. Second, we have a generation that grew up with digital life and social media as their natural milieu. With the advent of broad social media-driven news, we have a communications platform that allows people to instantly communicate with a mass audience and a group of messengers who are native speakers in its use.

So what’s next? Many of the young people driving the present moment already know. This movement is not about convincing Americans of the necessity to end mass shootings. This is about galvanizing advocacy and bringing pressure to bear with our elected officials to move the agenda forward. As the last few months have shown, if government is too slow or unwilling to act, these young patriots understand that commercial action and social pressure can drive public safety just as well, if not better, than traditional advocacy of the past.

Sarah Saxton was a student government leader at Virginia Tech during the 2007 shooting and is a vice president of research at Ipsos. Chris Jackson, Mallory Newall, and Dr. Janine Beekman lead the public polling team at Ipsos and contributed to this column.