CNN has hosted plenty of town-hall discussions between elected officials and their constituents, but none has featured the vivid emotion—and, at some points, barely contained rage—of the event it hosted Wednesday night. In an arena in Sunrise, Florida, students, parents, and teachers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School demanded gun control from their elected officials and an N.R.A. spokeswoman. Some, like Senator Marco Rubio, went viral for how outmatched they seemed by the teens. Others, like Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, made their own impassioned pleas for gun reform. But it was abundantly clear that the teenagers dominated the conversation, and could well be on their way to permanently altering the national attitude toward guns.

Rubio seemed to be the main focus of the room’s anger last night, to the point that Axios described him this morning as being “bullied” by those in the room. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in the AR-15 attack by 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, called out Rubio for failing, in the week since the shooting, to come out with a strong stance on making changes with the N.R.A. “Sen. Rubio, I want to like you. Here’s the problem . . . Your comments this week and those of our president have been pathetically weak,” he said. “Look at me and tell me guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in the school this week.” Rubio responded: “I’m saying that the problems we are facing here today cannot be solved by gun laws alone.”

Confronted directly by Cameron Kasky, who survived the shooting, and asked if he would refuse to accept further donations from the N.R.A., Rubio hedged, and was loudly booed by the audience.

He was booed online, too.

Fourteen-year-old Avery Anger, who hid in a closet during the shooting last week, told CNN afterward that she wasn’t sure what was achieved during the discussion. She said she came to the night with one question: “is it going to be safe for me to go back to school?” As she told CNN, “I don’t feel like they answered the question.”

But Anger and her classmates, it seems, will have plenty more opportunities to ask it. With the March for Our Lives planned for March 24 in Washington, D.C., and in an increasing number of cities around the country, the conversation about gun control once deemed “too soon” after a mass shooting is happening at a volume rarely seen before. And no matter how many celebrities join their cause, we largely have the teens of Parkland, Florida, to thank.

Senior Ryan Deitsch reminded Rubio that he has been doing active-shooter drills since elementary school, when he once hid in a bathroom for three hours while there was an active shooter in town. Now almost grown up, he is the one stepping up for action. He told Rubio, who brought up his proposal for a gun-violence restraining order, that meager proposals like that just aren’t enough for the change he wants to see.

“I do appreciate your words there, but that feels like the first step of a 5K run.”