- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Laura & John Beckworth, BP Ameri Joe Latimer & Joni Hartgraves.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- We decided that we are gonna change things, because it wasn't a matter of whether or not it was actually possible, it was that because what happened to us was so awful, it didn't matter what people considered possible.

We're going to make what many considered impossible, possible for the sake of our cla (inspirational music) (bright music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidentia Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talkin to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our t Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

David Hogg's life was forever ch by the mass shooting he experien at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida in 2018, which led to his life as an activist and co-founder of the nonprofit organization, March for Our Lives.

He has since become one of the leading voices of his generation.

Tonight he talks about his quest to reduce gun violence, the power of social movements, and what makes his generation, G different from other generations of Americans.

David Hogg, welcome.

- Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

- The shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida changed you in ways I'm sure you could not possibly imagine.

So, what do you remember most about that day?

- I think what I remember most about that day was the fear that my classmates the uncertainty, the anger, the existential dread of not knowing whether or not they were gonna survive.

And I say that knowing now, of c that the shooting happened in the building next to where I But when you're in a school shoo 'cause Parkland, you know, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, my high school is an outdoor sch It may be hard for some people that didn't grow up with palm tr to understand what our school lo but it's an outdoor school.

There's multiple buildings, so we could hear gunshots ringin and echoing between the building But you don't know if there's multiple shooters on campus at the time.

And I will always remember the fear that my classmates had and how also angry they were simultaneously, that this was happening, as we grew up as a generation hearing from our politicians that constantly gave us their thoughts and prayers, that the answer to this was simp to have our teachers be our bodyguards, essentially, and demand that they have the courage to stand up.

I just met a teacher today here at an event that I was doing who told me that as part of the they're instructed to basically be a human shield for their students here in Texas and that is so upsetting and ridiculous to me, because we shouldn't be asking teachers, like my mom, or teachers like that one that I met earlier today, to have the courage to lay their lives down simply because our politicians have refused to have the courage to stand up and the gun lobby to protect our and not somebody like the shooter at my high school's, quote unquote, right to an AR-15 when he had repeatedly threatene to shoot up my high school.

- So, you've written that your l may have been saved by a janitor How did that happen?

- Well, as we were leaving our c going to our fire evacuation zone, 'cause you know, it was a freezing cold day in February in South Florida.

It was 70 degrees.

Our door was open to our classro so we could hear people outside We could hear what was going on outside of our classroom and everything going on in between the buildings, 'cause it echoes.

And I distinctly remember looking at my classmate and saying, "Hey."

We both looked at each other and said we heard something that sounded like a gunshot.

Turned to a teacher, and right as she closed the door, we started evacuating, and as we were evacuating, a flood of students started going in the opposite direction of where we were going, presuming it was a fire drill, p And as we were going towards our evacuation zone, a flood of student starts going in the opposite direction of where we were going, so we instinctually start follow And as we're running towards the general direction that they were running in, unbeknownst to us, that was actually where the shoo was occurring at the time, which we were running towards the freshman building.

And right as we were about to cr in front of the freshman buildin where, to the best of my recollection at the time, the shooter was trying to shoot from either the second or third story window to try to simulate what happened in Las Vegas, for example.

Thankfully, he wasn't able to do that, 'cause miraculously, I think the glass was somehow bu 'cause it was rated for hurrican Right as we were about to be in front of the freshman buildin some janitor stopped us and said, "Don't come this way.

"He's over here," and directed us into the nearest classroom, which was our culinary class.

- So, but as horrifying and as deadly as the shooting was, you write that, "The shooting made us stronger "instead of destroying us," how - I think it was because for the first time in my generation's existence we could talk about it, and we grew up with it too.

And what I mean by that is I was born a year after Columbine happened.

My generation has grown up in the thick of this.

I remember learning about Sandy Hook when I was in, I think I was in middle school when that happened, and being so angry that this continued to happen and thinking to myself like, something has to change, and then it didn't.

And I think the reason why it made us stronger is because we, as a generation, for the first time, we had the agency to actually do instead of just listening to these politicians send their thoughts and prayers.

Because finally, we were gaining the right to vote that thankfully, was granted to us by previous generations that helped to sign the 26th Amendment into law that lowered the voting age, and we were just furious.

And it was a galvanizing moment for our generation where we said, "You know what?

"We may not be adults fully yet, "but it's clear that the adults that are in power "clearly don't know what they're "and it's time for some new lead "And if the government doesn't change our gun laws, "it's time to change who's in go "by turning out record numbers of young people to vote," and that's just what we did.

- So were you conscious of the p of gun violence before the shoot Was that something that you carried in your mind, that possibility?

When I was a young person, we had duck and cover drills in the event of a nuclear holoca And I'm not sure it registered, but it was a drill that we went so you knew that there was the p that something might happen.

Did you have that same realizati as you were going to school ever - I did.

I think any student in America has that realization, and it's horrifying, because we know that one day there could be a school shooting And I knew about it especially, because of my experience in speech and debate where I had to argue for four ye on both sides of the gun control I had to argue for and against universal background checks, for example, and in speech and d you can't just argue one side, you have to argue equally strong And from that, I knew the statistics of school shootings.

I knew how prevalent gun violenc in the United States as well.

And as a result, I knew it was a possibility.

Of course, you never think that it's actually going to happen at your school.

The day that the shooting happen in fact, many people thought that it might just be a drill, because there's oftentimes live fire with blanks or whatever to simulate a school shooting during some of these drills.

And as a result, we did think it was a possibility, but you never think it's gonna happen to you.

'Cause Parkland was the safest community in Florida.

My family moved to Parkland, because it was the safest community that we could find with some of the best education.

And if it can happen in Parkland, it can happen anywhere - So, it's not easy to create a social movement, but that's exactly what you did by helping to co-found March for Our Lives.

How did that come about?

- So after the shooting, a group of classmates and I came We were put in a group chat that a group of students had started to put together about what are we gonna do about And I had been on TV talking in the aftermath of the shooting not originally as an activist, but as a student journalist, because I didn't want talking heads on Fox News or CNN that had no idea what it was like in Parkland, had never been there and had frankly debated this issue for the past 20 years and got practically no progress on it, to be dictating the narrative around what happened at my schoo I wanted my classmates to be able to have their own voice and speak out on their own terms instead of letting the media dic what was and wasn't newsworthy.

And that's why I started speakin because I knew how to talk on ca 'cause my experience in TV produ 'cause I wanted to be a broadcast journalist when I was in high school.

And also, I knew about the gun p because of my experience in speech and debate.

And the way that we started organizing was as I was on TV, and as I was working to get other students on TV too, we got put in this group chat, and we showed up on a friend's living room floor to help organize.

And we decided that we were gonn to do a march in Washington, and we thought that we'd also tr to get people up to Tallahassee to try to change gun laws.

And when we showed up there, many people said to us, when we were planning on showing many people said to us, "This isn't possible.

"It's terrible what happened to "but nothing's gonna change, 'cause this is Florida, "and gun laws don't get stronger here, they get weaker."

And like any teenager or any group of teenagers, there's nothing more that we lik than what we were told that we c 'cause there's a little rebel in every teenager.

- You don't say?

(laughs) - Yeah, as any parent could tell you.

And we decided that we were gonna change things.

Because it wasn't a matter of whether or not it was actually possible, it was that because what happened to us was so awful, it didn't matter what people considered possible.

We were going to make what many considered impossible, possible for the sake of our cla so that this didn't have to continue, and hopefully, somebody else wouldn't have to know this pain ever again.

And because of that, we showed up at our state legislature.

It was in session.

It was right before the election so we knew that we could help pressure them a lot.

And we ended up raising the age to buy a gun to 21 in Florida, and we passed a Red Flag Law that has since been used over 19 to disarm people that are at risk to themselves or others in Florida alone.

And part of the challenge with t is we can't talk about a shooting that doesn't happen, but we know in these instances that there's been so many people that were serious dangers to the that were not able to go out and murder other people because of the passage of that l And what's interesting too is the group who uses it most is Republican sheriffs, so it's a bipartisan issue, and those laws have still not been repealed in Florida, 'cause they were used so effecti And the Sheriff's Association really supports it as well.

So, it's not easy to help found that social movement, but thankfully, we also were sta on the shoulders of giants.

In particular, there's been many When we decided to do that march, we thought we'd get about 90 people to Washington DC and we ended up having over 800,000 march with us, and we had over 800 marches around the world on every continent, except the one with penguins.

And what enabled us to do that wasn't that we had a huge network of people that we knew in every single sta it's that we went out there and "We're gonna try to make this ch "and if this is gonna happen, "it's gonna be incumbent on whet "other young people show up and decide to make it possible."

And what helped to enable that more than anything was really powerful Black and Br that had led the gun safety movement for decades before Parkland, but it never go and still haven't got the attention or credit that they deserve, that enabled us to scale so quickly.

People like Amber Goodwin here in Austin, Texas, people like Erica Ford in New York, people like Pastor Mike in Oakland, California, and so m that have been doing this work for decades, that enabled us to really scale that so quickly, 'cause we didn't start the gun safety movement.

I would say that we added a significant chapter, but it was just that, it was one more chapter that we added to a book that started long before us.

- I wanna come back to your chap but let me pan out for a moment and give you some statistics from Pew Research.

A majority of Americans, over six out of 10, say it's too easy to legally obtain a gun in this country, and nearly as many, 58%, favor greater gun restrictions.

So, at a 30,000 foot level, Davi why is it so hard to get gun reform into law?

- The filibuster, it's as simple Far more than the NRA, far more than any other organization, the reason why it is so hard for to get comprehensive federal gun is because we have a system of g that does not necessarily represent the people specifically with regards to the as much as it represents rural areas and land more than it does people.

And far more than that even, we have this archaic law or rule that has been around that was first weaponized as a tool to suppress fights against Jim Crow- - Sure, civil rights.

- and systemic racism and civil and we're seeing used over and o to stifle any progress on many of the issues that are affecting Americans so greatly in this country.

And the biggest thing, the biggest obstacle to us passing comprehensive gun reform is the filibuster.

And that is why those polls, despite showing that people are so supportive of it, it's proven so hard for us to get any gun legislatio - Let me quote you.

You write in your book "#Never A "It happens the same way every t "A bunch of kids get killed, "then their parents ask for some modest reforms "to gun regulations.

"Then the conspiracy theorists a "and Fox News start ranting about the Nazi Communists "who wanna destroy America by taking away everyone's guns."

Do you see that paradigm ever ch - Yes, I think part of the major obstacle that we've seen is that after Parkland, there were so many conspiracies that were spread about us, saying that the shooting, for example, at my school was fa that people said to us that we were paid government actors that were here to take everybody and other ridiculous things like For a long time, I didn't understand why those were so prevalent, but I came to understand why, and it comes down to two things.

One, it's that our education system did such a good job of uniquely preparing us in some Many of us knew how to talk on c and how to talk about the gun po When we went out there and started speaking out, it was so unbelievable to people that we knew what we were talkin as a group of teenagers, because they have so little faith in our education system, it was more believable to millions of Americans that we worked for the FBI or some other government agency, than that our education system could have actually done its job, which says a lot about how Americans view our education system and how little faith they have i which is extremely unfortunate.

But the second thing is too, the NRA after these shootings always says that you can't talk about this, because if you talk about this, you're politicizing tragedy.

That's always what they say.

- True.

- Now let me ask you this.

If the very young people who survived a school shooting are saying you need to do someth how are you supposed to say to t "You're politicizing this," when the very people that went through this are sayin "You need to do something."

You can't say that.

So what you need to do is concoct such a disgusting and ridiculous story in the form of this conspiracy theory that that smear campaign of those young people becomes the story, instead of what those young people are actually saying in the first And those two reasons are why so much of that has happened along with the commodification of hatred that we've seen, where people like Alex Jones can and make millions of dollars spreading ridiculous lies about people like myself, that then results in not only him getting millions of dollars, but also activists getting death My family got probably well over 100 death threats in the year after the shooting, including my own mother.

It's a direct violation of our first amendment rights to make our voice heard.

It is intimidation to try to stop us from speaking up, because they know the power of these young people speaking up in the first place.

So instead of trying to actually argue with us with logic, they have to concoct these disgusting conspiracy theories, so that smear campaign becomes t instead of people actually listening to what I'm saying.

- So you talked about the... You alluded to the personal cost of your activism.

There have been threats on your There have been threats on the l of the members of your family.

A well-known Republican congress has called you a coward and a crisis actor.

Your family's been harassed.

What keeps you going?

- Knowing that I'm going to outl knowing that I have the greatest that anybody can have on their side in politics, which is that it's not money that motivates me, it's not just blind power that motivates me, it's being on the right side of to help change this issue, where every other country doesn't have this problem, including the countries like Swi because they have an extremely strong regime of regulations around firearm ow All I want is a similar system.

If you own a gun, you should need to go to the same process as you need to own a car.

You should need a license.

You should need insurance.

You should need to have it regis I think it's basic common sense, things like that, that can really help reduce and prevent things like happened in Parkland.

And I know that with the platfor and privilege that I've been giv to help other people and help end things like happen or prevent things like happened in Parkland from ever happening again that there's so much good I can do with that and so much good that has come f that I'll never stop doing it.

- What makes your generation, Generation Z, as it's called, different from previous generations of Americans?

- I think the level of anxiety that we have about the future is what makes Gen Z different to some extent, and I think that's because of a combination of factors.

I think the plurality of what ca is social media actually, and the algorithms that have been weaponized against our children to essentially turn them into products for advertisers.

'Cause it's often set on the int "If you're using a service for free, you are the product."

- Hmm, right.

- And I think that has played the biggest role of all.

But I also think it's seeing our government fail to act on things like school sho Previous generations went through lockdown drills, as you mentioned, for nuclear bo The difference was that those bombs never went off in the US, at least, right?

- Right.

- The bomb is now going off multiple times a year with these school shootings, so it is far more real for these young people.

And then I think the anxiety that they have about the climate catastrophe that we're going through right n and our government's large failu to successfully address that as And the corruption of our politi where so many young people have that anything's ever gonna get b because they see Democrats and R both taking corporate money, both being owned by a lot of the same special interests and feeling like nobody truly represents them, which is why I'm doing the work with my organizational leaders.

We deserve to elect young people who don't take corporate money to help give those young people that change is possible.

'Cause what I fear for my genera it's not any one person or polit What I fear is that we will fall into the trap of cynicism and ho that brought us here, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That says that the system is so the politicians are so corrupt, the system is so broken that nothing is ever going to ge so you might as well not even bother trying.

And if we bought into that after I may have had to bury my own mo because a man who sent her a dea we were able to use some of the that we passed after Parkland to disarm him.

If we bought into that cynicism and hopelessness, several thousand people would probably be dead right now in Florida, because of the 19,00 that Red Flag Law has been used to disarm people that are a risk to themselves or And for our generation, I just hope that we don't give u - So you've seen in your generation a recognition of the failure of our government in meeting the needs of a younger generation of Americans.

But we also see an erosion in a faith in democracy.

Where does that come from?

- The failure of our government to respond.

You know, it's the erosion that we're seeing of faith and democracy, I would directly pin on the failure of our government to respond.

Because here's the thing, we have a system of government that is theoretically supposed t in some ways, majoritarian.

If you have a majority in the Se you should be able to govern, ev that's not actually proportionally representational of how many people there are, but you can't even do that, because you need 60 votes to be able to really pass anything that's not just a tax bill essen When that happens, you're gonna have people that keep getting elected over and over and over again that fail to deliver on what the majority of people want, like gun control, because it's basically impossible for it to be passed in a substan when you need those 60 votes.

Because even when Democrats have power, for example, I'll tell you right now, if Democrats had 60 votes in the we are still not getting gun control passed.

And the reason why is because I whoever the majority leader is is going to say, "Well, David," or, "Well," to the gun safety movement in ge "we care about gun safety a lot, but you know what, "these senators in North Dakota, wherever those 10 other votes come from in the Senate, "they're in too many vulnerable positions right now, "and we just can't vote on that, so you gotta wait," and it will cost lives.

The reason why I'm talking to you right now, and we're having this conversation in the first place, is because both Democrats and Re have failed to pass gun control.

Thankfully, that has changed in recent years with the first gun control bill being passed in 30 years with after Uvalde and Buffalo where they passed the bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

But you know, Obama had the chan with a filibuster-proof majority to pass gun control legislation, but they didn't when they had th And I understand that that era was different, but nonetheless, they had the ch and they didn't take it.

And that's something that I will never forgive these politicians for, because it's not okay just to directly say that it's o that's responsible for this when both parties have had power in the past, and both have failed to do it.

Thankfully again though, we've seen that change, and I want people to stay politically engaged.

But until we abolish the filibus it's gonna be impossible for us to pass substantial gun reform.

- What does your future hold?

- I think my future holds helpin more great young people elected.

In the past, I wanted to run for I said when I was 18 years old, I wanted to run when I was 25.

I'm 24 now.

I realized in the time since tho there's a lot more power in help to get incredible young people e so that no matter what happens f if one of those death threats ever does become the reality, I can make sure that the movement is still growing, and there's 30 or 40 people in our state governments in Congress that I've helped to by substantially helping to fund their campaigns and work with their campaigns to get them elected, so that no matter what happens t the gun safety movement has the ultimate insurance policy, which is that generation of people getting elected.

So that's what I'm doing now with my organization leaders.

We deserve is, I'm gonna states like Texas, where this year we're spending over $1 million in the state legislature to help elect young people, because we know if we get Texas in the future, forget about Pennsylvania, this can become the keystone state right here in Texas.

So that's part of the reason we' to lay the ground work here in t not only to change gun laws in the state legislature, but play a 30-year chess game he to help elect some incredible young people, like LBJ was when he was 28-year when he was first elected right here in Austin, Texas.

- David Hogg, thank you for bein - Absolutely.

Thank you.

(inspirational music) (inspirational music continues) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Laura & John Beckworth, BP Ameri Joe Latimer & Joni Hartgraves.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(playful flute music) (bright music)