GENERATION Z, the iGeneration, Digital Natives, Plurals — now young people aged five to 19 years old have been saddled with another label: they are the mass shooting generation.

And before they’ve even reached adulthood, they are having to demand not to be killed.

On March 24, young people across the United States will take part in “The March For Our Lives”.

It has reached this point. The grown-ups have failed to protect their children, and American kids are standing up to say it isn’t fair that they risk being mown down with a semiautomatic every time they walk through the school gates.

Those gates now come with metal detectors to find weapons, and class timetables feature regular drills on what to do when a gunman starts rampaging through the hallways.

Last week, an appalled mother wrote a blistering post on Facebook about advice issued to the youngest students on how to distract a murderer by shouting and throwing items in the air. “This is the current state of affairs,” she said. “We live in a country where kindergarteners learn how to maximise the number of lives they can save as they’re being massacred.”

Millennials were born into a world where computers were just beginning to become central to our lives. Gen Zs, those categorised as being born between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, grew up in an age where the Columbine High School mass shooting of 1999 set the template for the now regular attacks. Terror was no longer about important government buildings and foreign forces, it was about the unhappy boy in your year holding a gun to your head in the cafeteria.

Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High had already speculated that Nikolas Cruz, 19, seemed like the type, before he killed 17 people and injured 15 on a rifle-toting rampage through his old school in Parkland, Florida.

The FBI had investigated him. But the depressed, bereaved young man — with a gun in his room, a string of threatening social media posts and a ban from carrying a backpack on campus — just didn’t stand out enough.

‘OUR BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’

The 18th school shooting of 2018 has been followed by the now standard tears, recriminations and debate over gun laws, policing and mental health. If the slaughter of primary-age children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 couldn’t change anything, onlookers despair, how will this?

One point of difference this time around, and perhaps the only hope for a different outcome, is that Gen Z is growing up, and taking matters into its own hands.

In an extraordinary speech that went viral over the weekend, Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez took to the mic to make it clear she and her peers had had enough.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA [National Rifle Association] telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” cried the high school senior, as the crowd joined in chanting her refrain.

“They say that tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.”

Later, she and fellow young activists faced a camera to announce: “The adults have let us down ... we have to do the dirty work here and we’re going to do the dirty work. We’re going to shoulder this heavy burden.”

Marjory Stoneman Douglas junior Cameron Kasky, who helped start the Facebook group “Never Again”, added: “This cannot be the normal. This can be changed and it will be changed and anybody who tells you that it can’t is buying into the facade that’s been created by the people who have our blood on their hands.”

The group already has more than 60,000 followers. The 11th grade (Year 12) student spent the weekend gathering students in a local park to discuss the March 24 protest, which will take place in Washington and across the country.

It will be bookended by the March 14 Women’s March and April 20 National School Walkout. If Generation Y were apathetic about activism, their successors seem to see no choice in the matter.

The walkouts began from the moment news of this latest tragedy began spreading through America. At South Broward High School, a 40-minute drive from the scene of the mass killings, a group of students marched with signs reading: “It Could Have Been Us”.

Gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action told the New York Times it had received so many requests from students, it had set up a separate arm just for them.

I envy reporters who only covered an out-of-the-blue mass shooting once upon a time. I'm 23, at a community paper & #Stoneman is my third. — Lulu Ramadan (@luluramadan) February 15, 2018

‘STONEMAN IS MY THIRD MASS SHOOTING’

On the evening of the attack, a young local news journalist in south-central Florida tweeted: “I envy reporters who only covered an out-of-the-blue mass shooting once upon a time. I’m 23, at a community paper & #Stoneman is my third.”

Lulu Ramadan, who is only just outside the Gen Z age-bracket, was 21 when she covered the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which left 49 dead. Last January, she was sent to the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting, where five people were murdered.

“Not to discredit the unique experiences each time, but it feels so familiar,” she told the New Yorker. “You could almost auto-populate these stories: just fill in the where-it-happened and how-many-killed. You just add the colour and the details. But you realise it’s the same: the gunshot blasts through the school hallway or the airport terminal or the night club.

“I don’t know if I could handle decades of this: being a fly on the wall to this kind of thing, for the public, but also writing stories that are supposed to force the people in charge to confront flaws and mistakes. Working long and hard on a story that results in zero change ... to work on multiple of these mass-shooting stories, and nothing happens? I don’t know how long I can take that.”

The question is now whether they can succeed where their parents have failed.

Donald Trump responded to the shooting by announcing a renewed focus on mental health. He blamed the FBI for failing to stop Mr Cruz ahead of his bloody rampage. Even more egregiously for many of those speaking out, he brought his own case of alleged Russian collusion into the debate. What he didn’t dwell on was gun control.

Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2018

Survivor Aly Sheehy tweeted back: “17 of my classmates are gone. That’s 17 futures, 17 children, and 17 friends stolen. But you’re right, it always has to be about you. How silly of me to forget. #neveragain.”

Morgan Williams, a 16-year-old junior, also tweeted the US President: “Oh my god. 17 OF MY CLASSMATES AND FRIENDS ARE GONE AND YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO MAKE THIS ABOUT RUSSIA???!! HAVE A DAMN HEART.”

David Hogg, an 18-year-old at the school who was saved by a caretaker, told CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota his sister’s two best friends died at the hands of the gunman, as he directly addressed Mr Trump.

“President Trump, you control the House of Representatives, you control the Senate, and you control the executive,” he said. “You haven’t taken a single bill for mental health care or gun control and passed it. And that’s pathetic. We’ve seen a government shutdown, we’ve seen tax reform, but nothing to save our children’s lives. Are you kidding me? You think now is the time to focus on the past and not the future to prevent the death of thousands of other children? You sicken me ... children are dying and so is the future of America.”

Putting her finger on the sheer awfulness of the situation, Ms Camerota replied to David and a classmate: “Something has gone terribly wrong when all of us adults are looking to you 14- and 18-year-olds for wisdom and to help us figure out how to solve this, but that’s where we are today.”

It appears that the kids are our final hope.

emma.reynolds@news.com.au | @emmareyn