On the surface, these are encouraging moments; democratically elected public officials investigating the facts of a terrible moment in American history and pushing towards public transparency and accountability. And yet, the excavation of the days leading up to the insurrection serves as a reminder of the weakness of our common faith in democracy (to say nothing of the House committee’s only Republican members being rendered pariahs in their party for participating). 

How to keep fighting now to shore up our democracy and make our country more fair? How to maintain some semblance of social hope? “Democracy has to be born anew every generation,” wrote American philosopher John Dewey in 1916, “and education is its midwife.” Put another way, American democracy is not safe simply because we still have regular elections, nor can it be saved by a committee report, however damning. 

That’s because it’s clearer now than at any other moment in recent memory that democracy isn’t defined solely — or even sufficiently — in terms of a constellation of institutions. Sure, if you don’t have regular elections, widespread access to voting, and power granted to those who get a majority of the votes, you certainly don’t have a democracy. But a country can also have those institutions and procedures . 

Democracy is more than that. It’s really a way of living — a series of cultural attitudes and patterns of behavior that coalesce into self-governance. We participants in a truly democratic community accept, seize and/or demand the privilege of having a say in determining how we all respond to the problems we collectively face. That’s the key. Sure, the particulars of our public institutions matter, but they are only truly democratic insofar as they adequately, reliably represent the popular will in charting our national course. 

So: Is our country still a ? In the days immediately after the massacre of children at school in Uvalde, Texas, that “the flagging of faith in our democracy does stem from the presence of evidence, but it’s not the historical record that’s to blame. Americans feel as though nothing can be done because we have grown accustomed to nothing being done.”

Indeed, our collective cynicism has been dearly bought through the clumsy national responses to the pandemic, climate change, gun violence and more. If we measure the health of our governing institutions by their ability to respond constructively to the problems we face, it’s clear that they aren’t living up to this project. After this year’s horrific, unspeakable violence in Uvalde, a decade after the Sandy Hook tragedy, — largely insufficient to have stopped that particular school shooting — and hoping that lobbyists for the gun industry don’t step in to make it uncomfortable for conservative lawmakers. This is the best we can do right now, which is both better than nothing and depressingly predictable. 

And yet, a road to healthier democracy is just there, waiting to be chosen instead of the cynical, despairing path we’re traveling. 

That is, the privilege of self-governance also bestows upon us collective accountability. Our institutions at representing the majority’s views on a range of questions, sure. And yes, our elections are increasingly foregone conclusions because of the twin perils of and campaigns with cash from . 

And yet, because we are a democracy, if our public institutions are , we, too, have a role in it. We cannot blame a king who ruled simply because his mother ruled before him. We cannot look to a religious authority to clarify what, precisely, our country should do next. If we’ve tolerated the profoundly corrosive gridlock of determined obstructionists, if we have permitted our elected officials to , if we’ve allowed them to hack away at campaign finance limits … well, all of this was done in our name by the people we chose to rule. 

There’s nothing fated about democracy, about whether it will survive or endure beyond one more electoral cycle or public crisis. No, the sustenance of our experiment in self-governance is ultimately up to us. Fortunately, that means that a better, more robust democratic community is always there, a choice for us to make, ready to be born anew. It’s a choice for the taking. It looks something more like last Saturday’s March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C. — the public assembling to alert their elected representatives to collective problems we face as Americans. As I wrote after Uvalde, there are so many reasons for them to expect that nothing can be done. Our institutions have failed them, failed us, so reliably for so many years on gun violence. Indeed, the rot in our political culture made an appearance at the D.C. rally — a man stormed into the gathering, threatening violence. 

It shouldn’t have to be like this. Traumatized, grieving activists demanding that their elected officials show they care about making communities safer shouldn’t have to face threats of further violence simply for raising their voices. 

But they came anyway, reminding the rest of us that democracy isn’t something you have, or somewhere you live. It’s something that you and your neighbors choose to do. It’s something that only thrives with energetic participation of those being pinched by the problems in our common life. And more of the March For Our Lives activists’ sort of insistence is the path back to something like democratic self-governance. At base, democracy rests upon nothing more and nothing less than our collective agreement that we deserve a voice in our political institutions’ shape and direction. No one and nothing else — not our leaders, not America’s past successes, — is going to do it for us.

Gun violence survivors and their families were left in terror Saturday at the March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., after a man close to the stage reportedly began shouting that he was armed. 

The disruption came during a moment of silence for the 21 lives lost in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting last month. To the shouts of ‘get down, get down,’ gun control activists and their supporters dropped to the ground as others began stampeding away from the stage.

The U.S. Park Police said an “individual was detained by officers” after the suspect’s screams pierced the silence, sending some of the tens of thousands of rally goers on the National Mall into a panic. “No weapons were involved and there is no risk to the public,” Park Police . 

For the families and survivors of mass shootings, the chaotic scene forced them to relive the most traumatic experiences of their lives. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was visibly shaken just moments after the commotion, remarking that it “took me back to the worst day of my life.” 

“Thankfully, there was no threat but it got everybody really frightened,” Guttenberg told The 74. “The reality is, no matter where we are in America today, people do have a fear that a gun could be in the vicinity and that was an unfortunately horrifying and scary experience.” 

The disturbing scene, he said, gave him a deeper understanding of the horror that his daughter experienced at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former student gunned down 17 people. That event sparked the March For Our Lives movement, which mobilized again this weekend to call for gun control regulations after the killings in Uvalde and a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, 10 days earlier.

Saturday’s rally went on after frightened attendees were reassured that an active threat did not exist. But before that, there was intense fear among the crowd, including one Parkland woman who said she was immediately reminded of the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert that . Others from Parkland, like Guttenberg, said it brought back the terror their children experienced at Marjory Stoneman. 

Homer Harvey, who identified himself as a friend and neighbor of Parkland survivor and March For Our Lives leader David Hogg, was backstage during the chaos. Hogg had just finished speaking and Harvey was walking over to congratulate him when he saw the suspect. He said a man, threatening that he was armed, hopped a fence into a secured backstage area. The fear of the moment, he said, “is not a video game.” 

“There are a lot of kids back there that are now crying and can’t get their heart rates down because this is what they have lived through,” Harvey said. “This is something that they have seen, and it just triggers everything in their brain saying that they are going to die.”

Hours earlier, Hogg that he knew there were supporters who would have liked to attend the march, but were afraid to “because of the state of violence in our country.”

Guttenberg said the experience reinforced the advocacy that brought him to the U.S. Capital. 

“All I can tell you is I’m not going to stop fighting until we have legislation that solves this problem,” he said. 

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told The 74. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”

“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you … don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, The 74 convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim … they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told The 74 in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via The 74’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

The settlement follows an admission by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it failed to properly investigate two tips warning federal law enforcement that a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student was planning an armed attack. Just 40 days before the Valentine’s Day massacre, a female caller to the FBI tip line reported that the former student had purchased guns and she feared he was “going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up.” She told the FBI, “I know he’s going to explode.” 

Another tip alerted officials to a comment on YouTube believed to be made by the suspected gunman, announcing plans to become “a professional school shooter.” Neither report was forwarded to the FBI’s South Florida office and the former student, who had  been expelled a year earlier, was never contacted. 

The court settlement’s details are confidential, but a person familiar with the agreement the government will pay $127.5 million to resolve a lawsuit from 40 families accusing the FBI of negligence. The tragedy resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members and left injured. The 23-year-old defendant pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. A trial scheduled for early next year will decide whether he receives the death penalty or life imprisonment. 

Settlements from federal agencies have been exceedingly rare, said consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services who provides expert witness testimony in school shooting litigation. 

“I cannot remember in my 30-plus years in the school safety field a time where I’ve ever seen a federal agency — in this case obviously the FBI — sued and settled, especially to this extent,” said Trump, who was hired as an expert witness by defense attorneys representing Broward County Public Schools following the Parkland shooting. He’s also worked on lawsuits following the 2012 mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the 2017 tragedy in San Bernardino, California. 

In a similar move last month, the an $88 million settlement with the survivors and families of those killed during a mass shooting at a South Carolina church in 2015. That lawsuit accused the FBI of failing to prevent the shooter — a self-proclaimed white supremacist who hoped to start a “race war” — from purchasing a gun to carry out the attack. 

Speaking about school safety litigation, Trump told The 74, “It could be potentially unprecedented to see the FBI actually settle a case like that, which means it has to be clear internally that some significant balls were dropped to the point where they determined it’s not winnable. I’m sure that most federal agencies don’t want to set a precedent that they’re going to easily settle lawsuits unless there’s really something there.” 

Kristina Infante, an attorney representing the Parkland families, that her clients had devoted their lives “to making the world a safer place” despite having suffered “immeasurable grief.” 

“Although no resolution could ever restore what the Parkland families lost, this settlement marks an important step toward justice,” Infante said. 

Andrew Pollack whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed in the shooting, commended the FBI for accepting wrongdoing and said that other agencies, including the local school district and sheriff’s office, have failed to acknowledge their mistakes. 

“The FBI has made changes to make sure this never happens again,” he told the Associated Press.

The Parkland victims’ families with the Broward County school district last month. 

Trump said that financial settlements following the Parkland shooting should serve as a wake-up call to districts across the country. Similar to the litigation against the FBI, campus safety lawsuits against school districts generally center on alleged failures by people or lapses in procedures and training. Such litigation doesn’t typically focus on faults in the districts’ physical campus security systems, he said. It’s important, he said, for school officials to compare their written policies against their real-world responses. 

“So many times there are gaps between policy and practice,” Trump said. “And when you have those gaps, those gaps create a greater safety risk and, in turn, a greater liability risk.”