Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

I taught in public schools for the better part of two decades, which means I have run lockdown drills with children who did not understand why and with teenagers who understood exactly why, and I have sat in faculty meetings where the question of what we would actually do if it happened here was answered with a pamphlet. So I want to begin by saying that the question of whether the debate has shifted is, for anyone who has worked in a school, a slightly strange one, because the debate has never been the problem. The debate has been going on since Columbine. What has been missing is a decision, and I think the honest answer about Parkland is that it produced several small decisions and no large one, and that the small ones may turn out to be more durable than the large one would have been.

Let me name the small ones, because they are real and the coverage has moved past them. Florida, a state with a Republican legislature and a Republican governor who had an A rating from the National Rifle Association, passed a law within three weeks that raised the age to buy a rifle to twenty-one, imposed a three-day waiting period, banned bump stocks, and created a process for courts to take guns from people a judge finds dangerous. Vermont, with a Republican governor who had campaigned against gun laws, did something similar in April. Several other states have passed what are being called red-flag laws this spring. Congress, in the omnibus bill in March, strengthened the background check database and funded school security programs. The Justice Department proposed a rule to ban bump stocks. The major retailers raised their purchase age to twenty-one and some stopped selling certain rifles. The banks announced lending policies. None of those is the assault weapons ban that the students in Washington were demanding. All of them are things that did not exist on February 13, and most of them were passed by the people who had spent twenty years saying nothing could pass.

Now the large decision that was not made, because I want to be fair about it. The students who organized the march wanted federal action: a ban on the kind of rifle used at their school, universal background checks, limits on magazines. None of that has happened, and none of it will happen this year, because the President said he was for it at a meeting on the last day of February, met with the NRA the following week, and has not mentioned it since. The Senate is not going to take it up. The House is not going to take it up. The movement’s largest ask produced a march and a set of speeches and, I think, a generation of young people who now believe something about politics that they did not believe in January. That last part may be the lasting shift. It is not a law.

I want to spend a paragraph on Santa Fe, because the question asks about lasting change and Santa Fe is the test. Ten people were killed at a high school in Texas two weeks ago, with a shotgun and a revolver, by a student who took them from his father. The response in Texas has been almost entirely different from the response in Florida. The governor held roundtables and released a plan built on more armed personnel in schools, more mental health screening, and better physical security, with nothing on who can buy what. The students at Santa Fe have not organized a march, and when reporters asked them about the Parkland students, several said they did not want to be used. That is not a failure of the Parkland movement. It is a demonstration that the debate shifts within the boundaries that each state’s politics permit, and that those boundaries did not move much in Texas, and that they did move in Florida, and that the difference is not the number of dead children. It is the number of suburban legislators who were afraid of their next election.

As a former teacher I will add the thing that I think is actually lasting and that almost nobody is measuring. Schools are being hardened. Districts across the country are spending money this spring on single-point entries, on cameras, on armed resource officers, on door locks that can be thrown from the inside, and in some states on training teachers to carry. I have mixed feelings about most of that, because I have seen what a school looks like when it is built around fear, and I do not think children learn well in a fortress. But it is being done, with real money, in red states and blue ones, and it will still be done in ten years. The students in Washington asked for a change in the law. What they got, mostly, was a change in the building.

So has the debate shifted in a lasting way? I think the answer is yes, in three ways that are smaller than the headlines and more durable than the march. The states have shown they will act when the suburbs demand it, which is new, and the red-flag laws in particular will spread. The businesses have decided that the firearms industry is a reputational risk, which is new and will not reverse. And a cohort of young people who were in high school this year have learned that they can command attention, which is new and which they will carry into elections for forty years. What has not shifted is the federal picture, which is where the students aimed and where the ground is hardest, and Santa Fe is the reminder that it is hardest for a reason. The reason is not that nobody cares. It is that the country does not agree, and no march, however large, changes that. Laws do, slowly, in the places that will pass them. The rest is a lesson plan for later.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

I hunt. I have a safe in the house with more rifles in it than my wife thinks is reasonable, I have two kids in public school, and I have sat through enough school-board meetings this spring to know what the conversation in East Texas actually sounds like, which is not what it sounds like on television. So I am going to answer this question from Texas, two weeks after Santa Fe, because I think Santa Fe is the thing that tells you whether Parkland changed anything, and I think the honest answer is that it changed some things in some places and nothing in others, and the places where it changed nothing are the places that would have to change for the federal picture to move.

Start with what happened in Florida, because I will give it its due. A Republican legislature and a governor who had never crossed the NRA in his life passed a bill in three weeks that raised the rifle purchase age to twenty-one, put in a waiting period, banned bump stocks, and created a red-flag process. That is more than Florida had done in twenty years and more than anyone expected. It passed because the students from that school were in Tallahassee every day looking legislators in the face, and because the suburban districts around Fort Lauderdale and Orlando and Tampa are the ones that decide whether Republicans keep the legislature, and those districts were on fire. I underwrite risk for a living. The legislature looked at its own risk and bought a policy. I do not blame it.

Now what happened in Texas. Ten people dead at Santa Fe High School two weeks ago, a student with his father’s shotgun and his father’s revolver. Not a rifle. Not a bump stock. Nothing on the list that Parkland produced would have touched it, and everybody here knows that, which is the first reason the response has been different. The second reason is the politics. The governor held three days of roundtables and came out with a plan that is almost entirely about the school and the shooter rather than the gun: more armed marshals, more mental health screening, better doors, better training, and a modest proposal about safe storage that the legislature will fight over next year. There was no march. The Santa Fe students, when the cameras came, said mostly that they did not want to be a cause. I do not think that is because Texans care less about dead children. I think it is because Texans do not believe the gun is the variable, and a political movement that is built on the gun being the variable has nothing to say to them.

That is the thing the national coverage keeps missing, and I want to say it plainly because I think it matters for the question of what lasts. There is not one gun debate in this country. There are two, and they are not about the same thing. In the suburbs of the big coastal cities and increasingly in the suburbs of the Sun Belt, the debate is about access, about who can buy what and when, and the Parkland students speak that language fluently and have moved it. In the rest of the country, the debate is about the person, about why a seventeen-year-old does this and what should have been noticed and who should have been in the building to stop him, and the Parkland students have nothing to say to that debate because it is not the one they are having. Santa Fe landed in the second debate. Parkland landed in the first. The country has not shifted on which debate it is having. It has just gotten louder about both.

So what has actually changed? Three things I can see from here, and I will tell you who pays for each. The states that were going to move have moved, and the red-flag laws in particular are going to spread, because they are the one thing that both debates can live with: they target the person, not the gun, and a judge is in the loop. The businesses have decided the industry is a liability, and the retailers and the banks are going to keep backing away, which costs the industry some and costs the buyer in Tyler nothing but a drive to a different store. And the schools are being hardened, everywhere, with real money, which is the thing nobody marched for and the thing that will still be in place in twenty years. My district is spending on doors and cameras and a second officer this summer. Nobody voted on that. The board just did it, the way boards do when the parents are scared.

What has not changed is Washington, and I do not think it will. The President said something about taking the guns first at a meeting in February and then met the NRA and has not said it since. Congress put background-check fixes and school-security money in the omnibus and considers itself done. The Senate is not going to take up an assault weapons ban in an election year, and if the Democrats win the House they will pass one and the Senate still will not, and the next shooting will produce the same week of speeches. That is not cynicism. It is a map, and the map says the federal picture moves only when the second debate moves, and the second debate did not move after Santa Fe, and if it did not move after Santa Fe it is not going to move after a march in Washington by students from Florida.

So my answer is yes, the debate shifted, in the places and on the questions where it was already loose, and no, it did not shift in the places and on the questions where it was fixed, and the fixed places are the ones that matter for anything national. The lasting change is a set of state laws, a corporate retreat, and a lot of hardened buildings, and a generation of kids who learned they could get on television. The lasting non-change is that half the country still thinks the gun is the variable and half still thinks the person is, and no number of dead children has yet persuaded either half to try the other side’s question. I would like that to be different. I have two kids in those buildings. But I will stay with the question until somebody names who pays, and on this one the answer is that nobody in Washington intends to.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

I spent two years working for a school district that had more administrators than explanations, and one of the things I learned there is that the response to a crisis is never the policy that gets announced. It is the policy that gets funded, staffed, and still exists three budget cycles later, and the gap between those two is where most of the announcements go to die. So I want to answer this question by separating what was said after Parkland from what was actually done, because I think the lasting shift, such as it is, is in the second column and not the first, and I think the people who are discouraged by the federal picture are looking at the wrong column.

What was said is familiar. The students demanded a federal assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and magazine limits. The President, at a televised meeting at the end of February, said he favored stronger background checks, raising the purchase age, and taking guns from dangerous people before due process, which was a sentence that startled his own party. A week later, after a meeting with the National Rifle Association, he had retreated to a proposal for arming teachers and a bump-stock rule. The Senate held a hearing. The House did nothing. The federal debate, as of this writing, is exactly where it was on February 13, and I expect it to stay there through the election.

What was done is less familiar and, I think, more important. Florida passed a bill in three weeks that would have been unthinkable in that legislature in January: twenty-one to buy a rifle, a waiting period, a bump-stock ban, and a court process for removing guns from people found dangerous. Vermont did something comparable under a Republican governor. New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island passed red-flag laws this spring, and several other states have them pending. New York, which already had the SAFE Act, is debating an extension. Congress put the Fix NICS bill, which penalizes agencies that fail to report records to the background-check system, and the STOP School Violence Act, which funds training and security, into the March spending bill, and both are now law. The Justice Department has published a proposed rule to classify bump stocks as machine guns. The major retailers raised the purchase age and some pulled certain rifles. The banks announced lending restrictions. Every one of those is a thing that exists on June 1 and did not exist on February 13, and every one of them was done by an institution that had spent years saying it could not or would not.

Now, as a paralegal, I want to say something about the red-flag laws specifically, because I think they are the lasting change and because I think they are being underestimated by both sides. A red-flag law, or extreme risk protection order, lets a family member or a police officer petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from a person a judge finds to be a danger, with notice and a hearing and a time limit. It targets the person rather than the gun, which is why Republican legislatures can pass it; it involves a judge, which is why the due-process objection is weaker than the NRA suggests; and it addresses the actual fact pattern of most of these shootings, which is a young man whom everyone around him had identified as a problem and whom no one had the legal tools to disarm. The Parkland shooter had been reported to the sheriff dozens of times and to the FBI twice. A red-flag law would not have required anyone to believe anything new about him. It would have given them something to do with what they already believed. That is a legal tool that did not exist in most states six months ago and will exist in most states within a few years, and it will be used, quietly, in thousands of cases that never make the news.

I want to be honest about Santa Fe, because the question asks whether the shift is lasting and Santa Fe happened two weeks ago. Ten dead in Texas, with a shotgun and a revolver taken from a parent’s closet. Nothing in the Parkland package would have prevented it, which the Parkland critics have been quick to point out, and the response in Texas has been a governor’s plan about school security and mental health with nothing on purchase. The Texas students have not marched and have said they do not want to. I take that as evidence of what I have been describing: the debate shifted where the local politics allowed it to shift, and the local politics in Texas allow for hardening and screening and not for restriction, and the federal debate, which requires Texas and Florida to want the same thing, is therefore stuck. That is not a surprise. It is the structure.

On the movement itself, I will say that I have watched a lot of mobilizations from the inside of a district office, and the ones that last are the ones that convert into institutions. The students have registered voters, which is an institution. They have a political organization with money, which is an institution. Whether they are still at it in 2020 is the question, and I would not bet against them, because the thing that drives a movement is not outrage, which fades, but the experience of having been listened to, which does not. Those students were listened to. They will remember that.

So my answer is that the debate shifted in a lasting way, in the second column. Not in the headlines, which are where it was in February, but in the state statutes, the court dockets, the retail policies, and the school budgets, where the changes are real, funded, and unlikely to be reversed. The federal column is where the movement aimed and where it hit nothing, and if you judge by that column you will conclude that nothing happened. I spent two years in an office that judged itself by its announcements. I would recommend the other column.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

I live in the state where the shift happened, so let me describe it from the inside, because I think the national coverage has turned Florida into a symbol and missed what it actually did, which was pass a law that is both more and less than it looks. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act was signed on March 9, twenty-three days after the shooting, by a governor who had an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association and a legislature that had spent two decades passing bills in the other direction. It raises the age to buy any firearm to twenty-one, imposes a three-day wait, bans bump stocks, creates a risk-protection order process for courts to remove guns from dangerous people, puts four hundred million dollars into school security and mental health, requires an armed presence in every school, and creates a program under which trained school staff can carry. The NRA sued the day it was signed. That is the law. Now let me tell you what it cost and who is paying, because that is where the question of whether anything lasts gets answered.

The armed-presence requirement is the piece that is landing on local government this spring, and I have spent enough time around county budgets to tell you it is landing hard. The state appropriated money for school resource officers, but not enough to put a sworn officer in every school in a state with four thousand of them, and the sheriffs in rural counties do not have the deputies to spare even if the money were there. So the districts are choosing between hiring officers they cannot find, arming staff under the guardian program that most of the large districts have refused to join, or pulling officers off patrol to meet a mandate the legislature passed in three weeks without asking what it cost. Lake County, where I live, is doing some of each. The school board meetings have been long. I do not say that to argue against the law. I say it because an unfunded mandate is a mandate that gets renegotiated in the next session, and the next session is where the durability of the Florida response will actually be decided.

The purchase provisions are different, and I think they will last, for a reason that has nothing to do with the students. The age limit and the waiting period and the bump-stock ban cost the state nothing. They are regulatory, not budgetary, and they were passed by a legislature that will face the suburban voters of Broward and Orange and Hillsborough in November and would rather not explain a repeal. The NRA lawsuit on the age limit will take years. In the meantime the law is the law, and in my experience a regulation that costs the state nothing and that a majority of voters support does not get repealed. It gets ignored by the people who dislike it and enforced by the people who do not, and it is still on the books in a decade.

The risk-protection orders are the part I would watch most closely, because they are the part that is actually being used. The Florida courts have issued something on the order of several hundred of them since March, mostly on petitions from law enforcement, mostly against people whom someone had already flagged. That is not a headline. It is a docket, and a docket is the most durable thing in government, because it generates its own constituency of sheriffs and judges and family members who have learned that the tool exists. The Parkland shooter had been reported to the Broward sheriff dozens of times. The deputies had nothing they could do with the reports. They now do. That is a change in the practice of policing in this state, and it will not be reversed, because the sheriffs like it.

Now the migration angle, which is my particular interest and which I think is the quietest and most lasting effect of all. Florida gains something like nine hundred new residents a day, a great many of them from the Northeast, and the Northeast has had the laws Florida just passed for years. The legislature did not move in March because it had a change of heart. It moved because the suburban districts around the big metros are now full of people from New Jersey and New York and Connecticut who grew up with waiting periods and did not understand why Florida had none, and those people vote in Republican primaries now. Parkland was the occasion. The demographics were the cause. And the demographics are not reversing; they are accelerating, which means the Florida of 2028 will be more like the Florida of March 2018 than like the Florida of January, regardless of what happens in Washington.

On the national picture I will be brief, because I think my fellow correspondents will cover it and because I think it is the wrong place to look. The President said he favored taking guns first and then met the NRA and has not said it since. Congress put background-check fixes and school-security money in the omnibus and went home. Santa Fe, two weeks ago, produced in Texas exactly the response Parkland did not produce in Florida, because the politics there are different and because the weapons were different. There is no federal shift. There was never going to be one in an election year, and the students who marched for one were marching for the thing that was least likely to happen.

So my answer is that the debate shifted in a lasting way in the states that were ready for it, and that the readiness was demographic before it was moral. In Florida the purchase restrictions will last because they are free, the risk-protection orders will last because the sheriffs use them, and the armed-presence mandate will be renegotiated because nobody asked what it cost. The students gave the legislature a reason. The people moving here from Westchester gave it a majority. I spend my evenings on a boat or with a book, and I have learned from both that the current matters more than the wind. The wind was the march. The current is the moving van.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent

I coach youth soccer, and I have two kids in elementary school, and I want to start with something that happened at practice in March that I think says more about whether the debate shifted than anything that happened in Washington. One of the dads on the sideline, a guy I have known for years who hunts every November and has a concealed carry permit, told me he had gone to the walkout at his daughter’s high school. Not to protest the walkout. To stand with her. He said he did not agree with the kids about the rifle ban and he was not going to pretend he did, but he was not going to let his daughter stand out there alone either. That is the shift, if there is one. It is not that gun owners changed their minds. It is that a lot of them decided the kids were not the enemy, and that is a different thing from the national organizations on either side wanting them to believe.

Now let me do the thing I do at work, which is separate the announcement from the delivery. The announcements after Parkland were large. The students wanted a federal assault weapons ban and universal background checks. The President said on television at the end of February that he favored raising the purchase age and taking guns from dangerous people before the courts got involved, which is a sentence I never expected to hear from him, and then he met with the NRA and the sentence disappeared. The delivery, at the federal level, was a background-check fix and some school security money tucked into the omnibus, plus a proposed rule on bump stocks. That is not nothing, but it is the kind of thing that would have passed after any shooting, and it is a long way from what was announced.

The delivery at the state level was more than I expected, and I want to give it credit. Florida passed a real law in three weeks. Vermont passed one under a Republican governor. A half dozen states passed red-flag laws this spring. Michigan passed nothing, which tells you something about Michigan, where the Upper Peninsula and the Thumb and the northern counties will not stand for purchase restrictions and the Detroit suburbs will not stand for nothing, and the legislature resolved that tension the way it usually does, which is by waiting for the session to end. I do not expect that to change. What I do expect is that the red-flag idea will get here eventually, because it is the one thing the dad on the sideline and the students at the walkout could both live with, and because a judge in the loop answers most of the objections I hear at the range.

Here is where I want to push against the national story, because I think it is wrong in a way that will matter for what lasts. The story is that the Parkland students changed the debate by being young and articulate and unafraid of the NRA. That is true as far as it goes. But the thing I watched in Michigan was not a debate being changed. It was a debate being sorted. The students and their organizers made the question about the rifle, about the AR-15 specifically, and in doing so they made it very easy for every gun owner in this state to decide that the movement was not about them. The dad on the sideline does not own an AR-15. He owns a deer rifle and a shotgun and a handgun, and when the students said the problem was the weapon of war, he heard that his guns were not the problem, and he was right, and he went back to his life. A movement that wanted to change the politics of gun ownership in Michigan would have talked about safe storage, about the guns that get taken from unlocked closets, about Santa Fe, where the weapons were a shotgun and a revolver that belonged to the shooter’s father. It did not, because that is a harder message and because it implicates the people who were sympathetic rather than the people who were not. So the sorting held. The suburbs that were already moving moved. The counties that were not did not. And the thing that would actually change the federal arithmetic, which is gun owners in places like Michigan deciding that some restriction is in their own interest, did not happen.

On the corporate side, I will add a supply-chain observation. When Dick’s and Walmart raised the purchase age and Dick’s pulled certain rifles, the firearms manufacturers lost a distribution channel that they will not easily replace, and when the banks announced lending policies, the manufacturers lost access to capital on the terms they were used to. That is a structural change in an industry, and it will last longer than any law, because it was made by companies protecting their brands and companies do not un-protect their brands. The industry will survive; the customers will drive to a different store. But the days of a national sporting goods chain treating a rifle like a tent are over, and that happened in a month, with no legislation at all.

So my answer is that the debate shifted, but it shifted by sorting rather than by persuading, and sorting is not a path to federal law. The suburbs that were ready got their state laws and will keep them. The companies that were nervous got out of the business and will stay out. The schools are being hardened everywhere, with money that boards are spending without a vote. And a generation of students learned that they could be heard, which will matter in elections for decades. What did not happen is the thing that would have had to happen for the federal picture to move, which is the dad on the sideline deciding that the movement was about his kid and not against his rifle. He was ready to decide that. Nobody asked him. Somebody should, and it should probably not be a student from Florida telling him what his gun is for.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent

I run social media campaigns for a living, and I want to say something about the Parkland students that I have not seen said by anyone over forty, which is that they did not go viral by accident. They were good. Not good for teenagers, good. Within seventy-two hours of the shooting they had a hashtag, a set of spokespeople who could handle a hostile interview, a schedule that put them on every network every day, and a message discipline that most political campaigns never achieve. By the time the March for Our Lives happened on March 24, they had raised millions, booked celebrities, and produced a day of coverage that was, from a marketing standpoint, flawless. I say that with admiration and I say it to set up the question, because the thing I know better than most people is that going viral and changing something are not the same event, and the gap between them is where I think this debate actually lives.

What went viral was the demand: ban the rifle, background checks for everyone, hold the NRA responsible. What changed, in the weeks after, was mostly a set of things nobody marched for. Florida raised the purchase age and created a red-flag process. Several other states did the same. Congress fixed the background-check database and funded school security. The retailers raised the age and dropped some products. The banks changed their lending terms. Delta lost a tax break in Georgia for ending an NRA discount, which was the moment when the boycott campaign stopped being a hashtag and started costing companies money, and when companies started deciding that the association was not worth it. Every one of those happened in the first six weeks, which is the window when attention is highest, and almost all of them happened in places where the attention could be converted into something a legislature or a board could actually do.

Here is what I know about attention, and it is the reason I am skeptical of the word lasting. Attention decays on a schedule. The Parkland hashtags peaked in the week of the march and have been falling since. Santa Fe, two weeks ago, with ten dead, got about a third of the engagement that Parkland got, and the drop-off is not because people care less about Texas children. It is because the second instance of anything gets less attention than the first, and the students at Santa Fe, who did not organize and said they did not want to be a cause, did not have the apparatus that the Parkland students built. The national organizations on both sides know this. The NRA’s whole strategy since February has been to wait, because they have learned over thirty years that the public’s attention is a resource that runs out, and the gun owners’ attention is a resource that does not.

So what lasts? I think three things, and none of them is the one the movement wanted. First, the corporate retreat. When a company decides that a product category is a brand risk, it does not go back, because the people who made the decision would have to admit they were wrong, and marketing departments do not do that. Dick’s will not put the rifles back. The banks will not reopen the credit lines. That is a permanent structural change in the industry’s distribution and it was made with no law at all. Second, the state laws, in the places where they passed, because repealing a gun law after a school shooting is a worse headline than passing one, and legislators know it. Third, and this is the one I would actually bet on, the students themselves. Not the movement, which will fade the way movements do, but the people. A seventeen-year-old who learned in March that she could get on CNN and make a senator uncomfortable is going to be a twenty-seven-year-old who runs for something, and there are a few thousand of her, and they have each other’s phone numbers. That is not a policy. It is a cohort, and cohorts last.

What does not last is the federal conversation, and I want to be blunt about why. The movement aimed at Washington because Washington is where the cameras are, and the cameras are what the movement was built for. But Washington is also where the arithmetic is worst, where the Senate is structured to reward the states with the fewest people and the most gun owners, and where an election year makes every vote a liability. The President figured that out in about a week, between the televised meeting where he said he would take the guns first and the meeting with the NRA after which he never said it again. The students were brilliant at the thing they were doing. The thing they were doing was not the thing that moves the Senate.

I will add one observation from the technology side, which is my actual interest. The thing that has changed permanently is that every school shooting from now on will be livestreamed, hashtagged, and organized within hours, by the students themselves, because Parkland taught them how. That cuts both ways. It means the attention will be more intense and faster each time. It also means the attention will decay faster, because the audience has seen the format. Attention is not a well. It is a battery, and every charge is a little smaller than the last.

So my answer is that the debate shifted, lastingly, in the things that could be done quickly by institutions that respond to attention, which are companies and state legislatures. It did not shift in the thing that cannot be done quickly and does not respond to attention, which is federal law. And it produced a few thousand young people who now know how the machine works, which is the one outcome I would not have predicted and the one I would be most careful about underestimating. The hashtags will be gone by fall. The kids will not.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

I have a daughter who is too young for a lockdown drill and will not be for long, and I want to answer this question as her father and as somebody who grew up in a county where a rifle in a truck was as unremarkable as a toolbox, because I think both of those things are true at once and the debate, as it is being conducted, cannot hold both. That is the honest starting point. The country is not having one argument about guns. It is having two, in two different vocabularies, and the Parkland students were fluent in one of them and did not know the other existed. Whether the debate has shifted depends on which argument you were listening to.

The argument the students were having is about access. Who can buy what, at what age, after what check, with what accessory. That argument moved. Florida passed a law in three weeks that raised the age, added a waiting period, banned bump stocks, and created a court process to disarm dangerous people, and it was passed by people who had never voted for a gun law in their lives. Vermont followed under a Republican governor. Several more states passed red-flag laws this spring. Congress fixed the background-check database and funded school security in the omnibus. The retailers and the banks pulled back. All of that happened in the access argument, in the places where that argument was already the one people were having, and I do not think any of it reverses.

The argument that Tennessee is having is about the person. Why does a seventeen-year-old do this, what should have been seen, who was supposed to be in the building, and what does it say about a country where a boy can be reported dozens of times and nobody has a tool to use. That argument has also moved, but it moved in a direction the national coverage does not count as movement, because it does not involve restricting a purchase. Our legislature passed a school safety package this spring with money for resource officers and threat assessment and building security, and nothing on who can buy what, and the governor signed it, and nobody in Washington noticed because it did not fit the story. The same thing happened in Texas after Santa Fe two weeks ago: the governor’s plan is marshals, mental health, and doors, and the Santa Fe students have said, mostly, that they do not want to be a cause. That is not Texans caring less. It is Texans having the other argument, and the other argument has an answer that is being funded.

Here is the thing I want to say about the two arguments, and it comes from working in a county public-works shop where the rural end of the county sends its labor into the city and gets lectures back. The access argument is a city argument. It is the argument of people who do not own guns, do not grow up around them, and experience them as a hazard that other people introduce into their lives. The person argument is a country argument. It is the argument of people who do own guns, grew up with them, and experience the shooter as a failure of family and community and law enforcement, not of the hardware. Both arguments are legitimate. Both have evidence. And the Parkland movement, with all its skill and sincerity, spoke only the first one, and in doing so it told half the country that the conversation was not for them. I watched that happen in Knox County. The students here did a walkout in March, and the kids from the city schools walked out, and the kids from the county schools, by and large, did not, and the ones who did not were not indifferent. They had just been told, by the national movement, that the problem was a weapon they thought of as a tool, and they did not see themselves in it.

What would a lasting shift look like? It would look like the two arguments finding the thing they share, and I think there is one, and I think it is the red-flag law. A process that lets a family or a sheriff go to a judge about a person, not a gun, and get an order to disarm him for a period, with a hearing and a time limit, is an answer to the person argument that the access argument can also accept. Tennessee does not have one. The Florida law created one and it is being used, hundreds of times already, mostly on petitions from law enforcement. If the movement that came out of Parkland wanted to change the federal picture, it would stop talking about the rifle and start talking about the judge, because the judge is the thing that the county kids who stayed in class could support without feeling that they had been told their fathers were the problem. It has not done that. I do not expect it to, because the rifle is what the cameras want.

So my answer is that the debate shifted lastingly within each argument and not between them. The access states got their access laws and will keep them. The person states got their school-safety money and will keep that. The companies retreated and will not return. The schools everywhere are being hardened, with money that boards are spending without a vote, and I have mixed feelings about that, because I have seen what a building looks like when it is designed around a threat, and it is not a school. The federal picture did not move and will not, because it requires the two arguments to want the same law, and nobody has offered them one. The students did a remarkable thing. They did it in one language. The country speaks two. Until somebody translates, the lasting shift is two separate conversations, each a little more certain than it was in January that the other is not listening.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent

I have two teenagers in Bismarck public schools, both of them have done the drills, and one of them asked me in February whether she should be scared. I told her the truth, which is that she is far more likely to be hurt driving to school on a January morning than by anyone in the building, and that the drill is a precaution and not a prediction. She accepted that, because she is a sensible girl and because it is true. I bring it up because I think the question of whether the debate has shifted has to start with whether the fear has shifted, and I think it has, and I think the fear is doing more to shape policy than any argument, and I am not sure that is a good thing.

Here is what I mean. The lasting change after Parkland is not a gun law. North Dakota passed none and will pass none, and I would not expect it to in a state where a deer rifle is a household appliance and the legislature meets for eighty days every other year. The lasting change is in the school budgets. Our district, like districts in every state I have read about, is spending money this summer on doors, cameras, visitor screening, and a second resource officer, and it is doing so without a vote, because the parents are scared and a board that does not respond to scared parents does not stay a board. That is happening in Florida with a law behind it and in North Dakota with no law at all. It is the one response that crosses every political line, and it is being made with almost no discussion of whether it works, what it costs, or what it does to a building to design it around the worst thing that could happen in it. I have raised children in schools that felt like schools. I would like my grandchildren to.

Now the political side, and I will be straight about it. The students from Florida did something remarkable. They got the attention of the whole country for six weeks, they moved the Florida legislature, and they produced a march in Washington that was bigger than anyone expected. But I watched the coverage from here and I noticed that the movement was speaking to the people who already agreed with it, and that it was speaking about a rifle most people in my state do not own and in terms that assumed the rifle was the problem. That is not an argument that lands in North Dakota, and it was not meant to. The movement wanted a federal law. A federal law requires senators from states like mine, and the movement made no attempt to give those senators anything they could vote for without being told at home that they had sold out the deer season. So the federal picture did not move, and it will not, and I do not say that with any satisfaction.

What did move, and I will give credit, is the states that were already leaning. Florida’s law is real and it will last. Vermont’s is real. The red-flag laws that passed this spring in a half dozen states are, I think, the one idea in the whole package that could eventually travel, because they are about a person a judge has found dangerous, with a hearing and a clock, and not about what hangs on the wall. The people I know who hunt would accept that. Most of them would have accepted it in January, if anyone had asked, and nobody did. The businesses also moved, and I have more mixed feelings about that than my fellow correspondents might. When a bank decides it will not lend to a lawful industry because of a hashtag, that is not a victory for public safety. It is a bank deciding that a legal product is a reputational liability, and the next legal product that becomes a reputational liability might be the one I work in. I would ask the people cheering that to think about where the precedent goes.

On Santa Fe, which happened two weeks ago and killed ten people with a shotgun and a revolver, I will say what I think is the plain truth, which is that it exposed the limit of the Parkland response in a way that should make everyone more careful. The Texas response was about the school and the person, not the gun, and the Texas students did not march and said they did not want to be used, and the national attention was a fraction of what Florida got. The people who say that proves Texans do not care are wrong. The people who say it proves the gun is not the issue are also oversimplifying, because a sixteen-year-old with access to his father’s unlocked guns is an issue that a safe-storage law would address and that nobody in either camp seems eager to talk about, because it implicates the people on both sides who think they are responsible. I keep two teenagers and a gun safe in the same house, and I will tell you the safe is the part of this that I think about most.

So has the debate shifted in a lasting way? I think it has shifted in a way that is lasting and mostly not in the way the people who wanted a shift intended. The buildings are changing, everywhere, for good, and nobody has asked whether that is the right thing. The states that were going to act have acted. The businesses have made a choice that will outlast the reason for it. A cohort of young people has learned that they can be heard, which I respect. And the federal conversation is exactly where it was, because the movement that aimed at it never learned to talk to the half of the country that it needed, and that half was never as unreachable as the coverage made it sound. My daughter asked if she should be scared. I would rather the country had asked what it was actually afraid of, and whether a door lock or a rifle ban or a court order answers it, before it started spending the money. It did not ask. It is spending anyway. That is the shift, and I would rather it had been a decision.