This past week marked the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, where on April 20, 1999, thirteen innocent lives were taken by two deranged gunmen. The very oldest members of the millennial generation were in high school in 1999, and Columbine shook us. It was too easy to imagine what it would be like if it happened at our school. Christian teens worldwide heard about “the girl who said, ‘Yes,'” when asked at gunpoint if she believed in God. Policies changed, but not necessarily around guns; trench coats were banned on many of our campuses, more schools reportedly use security cameras or have tighter perimeter controls.
But Columbine was not the defining moment of political awakening for the millennial generation. (That grisly honor is more appropriately reserved for Sept. 11, though some millennials were still just elementary school students the day the towers fell.) Identifying any one moment as the single moment of “political awakening” for a generation is a challenge, but that has not stopped many from suggesting the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas is the “awakening” for Generation Z.
Breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of student walk-outs and the multiday media focus on the March for Our Lives certainly tried to make the case that this was the moment Generation Z was arriving to re-shape our politics and “get something done” when the adults could not. But does the data bear it out? Do the kids who have received significant attention for their advocacy efforts represent a true, unique, generational shift in young people’s views? Republicans have lost millennials for a number of reasons, but will they lose Generation Z too over the issue of guns?
It’s certainly true to the extent the gun issue moves people in the under-30 age group it is more likely to be in the Democrats’ favor. According to polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics, young Democrats are sixteen points more likely than their Republican peers to say the issue will be important to their votes in the 2018 election. Their data shows while relatively few pro-gun or pro-NRA young people have switched away from their cause, there are many young people who used to simply not have an opinion on these issues who now side with stronger gun control policies such as an assault weapons ban. That certainly suggests an awakening for the slice of young people who previously had been totally checked-out on the issue.
But are guns the biggest issue for these young people? The latest poll out of the Harvard Institute of Politics makes strong assertions about the role the gun issue will play with these young millennials and Gen Z-ers. “This is now a lethal issue for incumbents standing for re-election in the fall,” says John Della Volpe, the director of the poll. To back it up, the poll cites the data above, as well as a figure of 77 percent of young people saying the issue will be important in determining their vote in 2018.
That’s an impressive number until you consider that most people tell pollsters lots of issues are important to their vote. Pew Research Center found 84 percent of people said the economy was “very important” to their vote in 2016. Not just important, very important! Some 80 percent said terrorism was very important, 75 percent said foreign policy was very important, 74 percent said health care was very important, 72 percent said gun policy was very important, and so on. Unfortunately, in the case of the Harvard poll, the question wasn’t asked of any other issues, so there’s no way to compare and contrast the weight of the finding about gun policy against other issues, so we don’t know if “77 percent say it is important” is a truly blockbuster finding or something more ho-hum.
Furthermore, the views of young people are not necessarily much different from that of other generations on guns. Yes, seven in ten young likely voters would like to see “more strict” gun policy, but that is not very different from the views of adults overall, among whom about the same proportion support stricter gun laws. Polling from NPR/Ipsos as well as polling from Quinnipiac each show around seven in ten people support an assault weapons ban, which is higher than the Harvard poll’s 58 percent of young people. (Curiously, Quinnipiac finds young people to be the age group least supportive of an assault weapons ban, though they also show young people giving the poorest marks to President Trump and the GOP on the issue elsewhere in the poll).
All of which is to say that young people support stricter gun laws and a slew of gun control measures, but are not necessarily any more likely than older Americans to hold those views. This is fairly shocking, simply given the yawning generation gaps that are demonstrable on issues like climate change, immigration, and race. There are plenty of reasons for Republicans to be worried about losing young voters, but the data thus far does not suggest the gun issue is a greater risk than the other issues where generation gaps are more pronounced.
Whether the Gen Z “awakening” on guns is a generation-wide fact or is more a narrative embraced by left-of-center adults eager for a fresh group of allies is not yet knowable, but the data available is decidedly mixed on the question. The shift on the gun issue is absolutely real, and it is notable that the shift has been greater post-Parkland than after any of the tragedies of the last five years.
But this is not unique to young people. After all, the average age of a protester at March For Our Lives was estimated to be 49 years old.
