Four months after a die-in at the state capitol, teenage activists are seeking to change the balance of power in the midterms

Four months ago, hundreds of Arizona students staged a die-in on the floor of their state Capitol to protest for stricter gun laws.

Now, many of those same students are working on a new campaign: registering their high school classmates to vote, with the goal of voting out the politicians who have blocked the passage of gun safety laws.

“This entire thing is led by mostly kids who can’t vote yet,” said Jordan Harb, 17, one of the organizers of March for Our Lives Arizona, a group of teenage gun violence prevention advocates running a statewide voter registration program.

Harb himself will not be old enough to vote this November. But that has not stopped him and his fellow teenage activists from leading an intensive campaign to shift the balance of power in the midterm elections.

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To vote National Rifle Association-backed candidates out of office, a coalition of gun violence prevention groups has launched a $1.75m campaign to register 50,000 young voters before this November’s midterm elections. Part of that money is going to nearly a dozen local groups, including March for Our Lives Phoenix, who are working to register 18- and 19-year-olds to vote.

Lower youth voter turnout in midterm elections tends to favor Republican candidates, who have blocked the passage of stricter federal gun control laws for decades. But gun violence prevention activists are trying to change that dynamic by bringing a wave of young voters to the polls.

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The Our Lives Our Vote campaign is backed by Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords, two gun violence prevention groups, and NextGen America, an advocacy group founded by the billionaire Tom Steyer, a major Democratic donor. The coalition says it has registered 27,000 voters through online and mail-in voter registration drives, focusing on 10 states where National Rifle Association-backed politicians are on the ballot. It’s now dedicating $600,000 to local groups organizing voter registration drives, including two groups run by high school students.

Since the 1999 Columbine high school shooting, and then the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, schools across the United States added drills to prepare students for how to respond if an attacker with a gun targeted their school.

The school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, this February, which left 17 people dead, sparked an unprecedented wave of youth gun control protests across the country. Thousands of schools nationwide held walkouts to protest against government inaction on preventing school shootings. The March for Our Lives, organized by student survivors from Parkland, Florida, sparked hundreds of rallies and marches worldwide, some with tens or even hundreds of thousands of participants.

After the Parkland shooting, students who had grown up with “active shooter” drills as a normal part of their lives had suddenly had enough.

“We have a strong hope that the fight for gun safety and the frustration of young people and others about politicians’ inability to keep them safe is going to drive them in large numbers to the polls,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, the gun violence prevention group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head during a mass shooting in Arizona in 2011.

Harb, the Arizona youth activist, was visiting Washington on a school trip when he heard the news of the 14 February Parkland shooting. His teacher, emotional about the news, asked their senator, Jeff Flake, what he was going to do in response. The senator, he recalled, made a “very politician-like answer” and talked about how “things just don’t work like that around here” when it came to the gun debate.

“It was just jarring to me,” Harb said, that his representative did not have a better answer “while children were siting there getting slaughtered”.