The boldest voices to emerge in the wake of last week’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have been unexpected ones. Surviving students at the school quickly spoke out on social media and to news cameras about the violence and, more broadly, about political leadership that they saw as having let them down. …
This is the first premeditated mass shooting at this scale that involved people who both grew up entirely in a world in which mass shootings were common and which targeted people old enough to have a voice.
Not only are they old enough to be heard, those in their late teens are also at an age when politics surges in importance.
Voter turnout increases as people get older, a function of greater personal stability (moving less often), and that voting tends to be habitual. But there’s evidence that those who are newly able to vote do so much more heavily than people even slightly older, in part a function of the novelty of being able to do so.
More broadly, the events experienced when you’re 18 are three times as powerful as events experienced at age 40 in terms of forming political views, according to analysis conducted by Catalist in 2014. CONT.
Philip Bump, Washington Post