Cultural tipping points are a slippery concept. Zealots can be too quick to declare temporary dynamics to be profound, permanent shifts. And history tells us that most change happens incrementally across societal ebbs and flows.
But tipping points do happen. Decades or generations of almost imperceptible shifts finally reach critical mass and start an avalanche. The seemingly sudden shift in attitudes toward gay marriage grew out of a long process of gays leaving the closet and being true to themselves amongst family, friends, and coworkers. Tipping points are often triggered by specific events or images. I am old enough to remember how the news footage of Bull Connor's vicious dogs attacking black protesters in Birmingham contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year. The MeToo movement started with a tweet.
It's too early to tell if the student survivors from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School represent a tipping point in our endless inability to deal with gun violence in America. It's hard not to see them as traumatized innocents who are about to be sliced and diced by the gun manufacturers and their bought-and-paid-for stooges: the NRA (their storm troopers), the Republican Party (their Politburo), Fox News (their Pravda), and the alt-right blogosphere (their online hate factories). The gun manufacturers have worked hard to own this country, and they will lierally stop at nothing to keep it that way.
But it feels different. This student uprising is a truly spontaneous revolt against the perceived norm, which is important. And the students have shown themselves to be not only passionate and tenacious but extraordinarily well spoken and savvy about the media--both mainstream and social. They are the gun lobby's worst nightmare--the voices of the young. innocent victims personified. The attempts yesterday to write them off as silly children or brand them as tools of the adult left did not go well--some of the individuals who did so have lost their jobs. They have put real pressure on Trump, Congress, and the Florida state legislature to take action. I don't see any of those people actually taking meaningful action, given that the NRA owns all of them, but you can see that they are finally feeling real heat, which is a very new thing for them. The students have made it clear that the NRA is their enemy and that they will attempt to shame any politician who accepts funds from that group. Most eye-opening of all, the students have forced the NRA to abandon their traditional strategy of total silence following a mass shooting and to lay low until the outrage dies down. They have forced the NRA out into the open in the middle of the national anger. Just today it was announced that NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch will join a live CNN town hall on gun violence that will air tonight. This is a huge tactical mistake on the part of the NRA. We will see angry, passionate, and eloquent teenaged survivors calling bullshit on the NRA on national television. I don't see how this represents anything but a huge trap for the gun lobby. We will see if they get really snared and if we're living through another tipping point for a seemingly impossible problem.