Tag: Todd Gitlin

Today, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting and just over two months after the shooting in Parkland, Fla., many students around the country are walking out of class again. One big question around these protests is what kind of lasting political impact this might have on a new generation of first-time voters. EMILY NAKANO: The first time I was behind a gun, I was probably 3 or 4. KHALID: Nakano's 18. She's part of this new generation of voters coming up behind millennials. KHALID: Anderson is a millennial who studied her generation. TODD GITLIN: Your attitudes vary greatly according to whether you were black or white, whether you were in the South or the North. GITLIN: It's not a function of birth dates. And he told me that he wasn't really politically aware until he came home from the war, and it did not have the same impact on everybody. Asma Khalid, NPR News.

"The first time I was behind a gun I was maybe 3 or 4," said Nakano. So, even though Nakano says she shoots as a hobby, she participated in a walkout at her school earlier this year calling for stricter gun laws because she says something needs to change. After the shooting in Parkland, Florida, students across the country began demanding new gun laws. These gun violence protests seem like a pivotal political moment for this new generation of soon-to-be-voters. Experts who study voting behavior say it's far too early to predict how much this moment will define Generation Z, but they point to the fact that events that occur when we're young tend to have an outsized impact on shaping our politics as we get older. And a vast majority of those likely voters – 77 percent – say gun control is an important factor in determining how they'll vote in the midterms. There is a distinction between Republicans and Democrats (and, of course, they may not all be on the same side of the gun control issue), but a majority of young people in both parties say it's important to their vote. "You had this older piece of the millennial generation realizing we are not alone in the world. Other analysts agree that the Vietnam War and the draft were some of the most crystallizing moments for young people who came of age in the '60s and early '70s. And he says the war itself didn't have the same impact on everybody.