Rally comes as teenage activists seek to push lawmakers who are blocking new gun control legislation out of office at the midterms

Less than three hours after news broke of another American mass shooting, this time at a gaming tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, a group of high school students had started organizing a protest outside the DC offices of senators who receive funding from the National Rifle Association.

“The only way to take down the NRA is to keep the pressure high,” 15-year-old Rebecca Heimbrock tweeted on Sunday afternoon, calling for protests Tuesday afternoon at the offices of senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rob Portman and senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, all Republicans who have received significant support from the NRA.

For years, the response to American mass shootings was a numbing ritual: intensive media coverage of the carnage, “thoughts and prayers” from politicians, and the continued refusal of Republican members of Congress to pass any gun control laws.

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But a new wave of student activism after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, this February has unsettled this routine. Now, along with responses from the usual advocacy groups, new attacks prompt an outpouring of responses from school shooting survivors and other teenage activists. Calls for new protests, like Heimbrock’s, can be quickly shared and amplified on social media.

Teenage gun control activists are not just holding die-ins and marches: they are focused on registering other young people to vote, with the goal of pushing lawmakers who are blocking new gun control legislation out of office at the midterms.

Survivors of the school shooting in Parkland spent the summer on a national “Road to Change” bus tour, working to register young people to vote at dozens of stops across the country. In Arizona, high school gun control advocates who are too young to vote themselves are organizing a statewide campaign to register their 18 and 19-year-old classmates and friends, backed with funding from gun violence prevention groups and a major Democratic donor.

It won’t be clear until November whether this student activism will be enough to shift the balance of power in Congress enough to break the blockade of Republican gun control opponents. What is obvious is that many of the American students horrified by the 14 February shooting in Parkland, which left 17 people dead, have stayed deeply involved in the gun control fight.

Heimbrock, a 15-year-old from Middletown, Maryland, about an hour outside of DC, is not a nationally famous student activist. She’s just one of the thousands of American teenagers who were galvanized by the Parkland shooting to fight for stricter gun control laws, and who have spent the last six months organizing one protest after another. For Heimbrock, that’s included participating in two previous sit-in on Capitol Hill in Washington, and helping to organize a 4 August protest outside the NRA’s headquarters in Virginia.

Her tweet about holding a protest Tuesday outside the offices of four NRA-backed senators gained traction quickly, thanks to her in-person relationships with other student activists, and to a Twitter boost from David Hogg, an 18-year-old Parkland activist with hundreds of thousands of followers.

By Sunday evening, Heimbrock had confirmed two speakers for her event: one student who had lost her cousin at a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in May, and another student from Great Mills High School in Maryland, the site of a smaller school shooting in March, and said at least 20 students had confirmed that they would be protesting alongside her.

Heimbrock said she was only “cautiously optimistic” that months of student advocacy work would translate into a victory for gun control advocates – meaning major defeats for Republican politicians - in the midterm elections.

“I want to believe that people are hearing student voices,” she said, “but I’m also worried that people are going to assume that there’s this big blue wave, and they’re not going to bother to go out to the polls.”