Gun control is now a winning issue for US Democrats – in the key swing state of Florida it's shaping up to be critical. Could it be the "Gunshine State" that helps end America's love affair with firearms?

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size At this time of day, Virginia Hernandez, an 18-year old Humanities student at Miami Dade College, would normally be in class. But today her professor dismissed the students early, telling them they had a more important place to be: a get-out-the-vote rally at the college's North Campus. So Hernandez and her friends are outside in the sun on this sweltering, soupy mid-October morning, for a lesson in democratic participation. Miami Dade, one of the biggest universities in the country, is an open-admission college, meaning anyone with a high school diploma can attend. Most students are black or Hispanic, and come from low-income families. Students on the North Campus specialise in cinematography, biology and funeral service education (there's even an on-site embalming laboratory and casket display room). The buildings are all grey concrete and harsh lines, reflecting the brutalist style popular in the 1960s. Softening the scene are rows of palm trees and a man-made lake, a favourite place for iguanas to bask in the sun. Dozens of the creatures – some fat and orange, with spikes running down their spines; others lithe and green –luxuriate by the water. Signs warn not to feed them: they can bite. Enrol to vote: students campaign to get their classmates engaged in Miami. Credit:Jorge Martinez


Today is the last day to register to vote in Florida before the November 6 midterm elections, and the university is going all-out to ensure that as many students as possible get their names on the electoral roll. Making voting cool is a hard ask, but they're giving it a red-hot go: a DJ is playing Drake and Rihanna, and food trucks serve free pizza and Cuban sandwiches. Loading The next challenge is convincing the students to cast a ballot. Voter turnout among young Americans is usually abysmal, especially in midterm elections. In the most recent midterms, in 2014, just 16 per cent of Americans aged between 18 and 29 voted compared to 55 per cent of those aged over 60. “This is a big deal,” campus president Malou Harris exhorts from a podium, reminding the students that previous generations risked their lives for the right to vote. “This election is a game changer!” Asked what the biggest issue is for them in their first election, Virginia Hernandez and classmate David Turino respond instantly: guns. “There should be more restrictions – there have to be background checks, it should be harder to buy a gun on the black market,” Hernandez says. Speaking to other students here, they say the same thing – for them, ending America's love affair with guns is the animating issue this election.


A gun shop on every corner: Miami. Credit:Jorge Martinez Nicknamed the Gunshine State, Florida has some of the loosest gun laws in America. Walking around Little Havana in downtown Miami, you see pawn stores everywhere displaying pistols, rifles and shotguns beside gold necklaces and stereo speakers. A big reason is the aggressive lobbying of the National Rifle Association (NRA), led in Florida by the organisation's "first lady of freedom" Marion Hammer, who has worked for decades pressuring the state's politicians to enact gun-friendly legislation. In 2016, there were 2700 deaths by firearm in Florida, more than the total recorded in Australia over the past decade. It is also the site of some of the country's deadliest mass shootings. Forty-nine people were gunned down at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. And in February this year, 17 people were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a 40-minute drive from Miami Dade College. It is impossible to overestimate how numb most Americans had become to the regularity of mass shootings at the time of the Parkland shooting. We don’t want your f---ing thoughts and prayers, we want you to do something.


When a gunman opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas last October, killing 58 people, former congressman Steve Israel wrote an opinion article in The New York Times the next day headlined: “Nothing Will Change After the Las Vegas Shooting”. In the piece, he laid blame with the NRA and the Republican Party – but also the general public. “You’ve become inoculated,” he said, addressing readers. “You’ll watch or listen to the news and shake your head then flip to another channel or another app. This horrific event will recede into our collective memory.” He was right. Just days after the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in US history, gun control faded from the headlines. Congress passed no legislation to stop a similar massacre happening again. But after Parkland, something changed. The students who survived the attack harnessed their grief to create a national student movement dedicated to preventing gun violence. Emma Gonzalez yells, "We call BS!" at a rally for gun safety after the Parkdale shootings. Credit:Alamy It started the night after the shooting, when a small group of Parkland students got together and came up with the name Never Again, which soon became a trending hashtag on Twitter. At a rally the week after the shooting Senior student Emma Gonzalez shot to national attention with her blistering “we call BS” speech. “Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS,” she said.


At a town hall meeting broadcast live on CNN, surviving students and the parents of victims confronted Republican Senator Marco Rubio and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch in what has been described as one of the TV events of the year. You've become inoculated. This horrific event will recede into our collective memory. The month after the shooting the students organised the March for Our Lives, a rally in Washington DC that drew between 1.2 and 2 million people, making it one of the largest protests in American history. In the lead up to the midterms, the Parkland students embarked upon a 20-state bus tour with two clear goals: enrolling as many first-time voters as possible and making gun safety a top-tier election issue. Dana Loesch, spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018. Credit:AP Robert Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control, says Parkland was a turning point in the US gun safety debate. “This was the first time high-school students themselves seized the moment and said, 'We’re sick and tired of the government doing nothing',” he said.

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