BAY AREA — Rudy Corpuz arrived at the funeral expecting to move through it the way he usually did. He would bow his head in respect with everyone else, occasionally meeting eyes with a loved one, only to purse his lips in shared sadness and lower his gaze again.
But this time, something interrupted that rhythm.
The girl was 16. She had been killed in a shooting, and when Corpuz looked around the room, what struck him was the faces of the teenagers gathered there, many of them her friends. “They weren’t even crying no more,” said Corpuz, executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco violence prevention organization, who has worked with youth for more than three decades. For him, the stillness in the room signaled something deeper than grief. It signaled familiarity and a shift in how grief is dealt with.
That shift is part of what youth organizers say has changed in the eight years since March for Our Lives first galvanized millions of students nationwide to demand action against gun violence. For many teenagers growing up around shootings, the violence has begun to feel routine. Conversations with national organizers, Bay Area community mentors, and local youth activists reveal how a generation raised amid constant gun violence is navigating activism in a moment when the crisis persists but the national spotlight has faded.
A timeline from 2018-present
When March For Our Lives erupted in 2018 after the shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, it did more than bring students into the streets. It changed who got to speak about gun violence.
For a moment, young people were not just the victims or the backdrop of the story; they were at its center, demanding to be heard. For Trevon Bosley, now Board Chair of the March For Our Lives Action Fund, that was the most powerful part of the moment.
“Youth were at the forefront,” he said. Just as important, the movement briefly broke down a divide that had long shaped public conversations around gun violence. “Black and brown stories that had been ignored finally had a platform,” he said, creating “a unified front.”
That sense of possibility helped define March 24, 2018. But it did not resolve the crisis.
In 2023, 46,278 people died from gun-related injuries in the United States, the third-highest annual total on record. Gun murders, which surged during the coronavirus pandemic, have fallen from their 2021 peak, but gun suicides have continued to rise, reaching a record high in 2023. For minors, firearms remain the leading cause of death. The movement’s urgency didn’t fade because the crisis faded. If anything, the problem became harder to look away from and, paradoxically, easier to grow used to.
That is the reality organizers and youth activists say they are now confronting. The challenge is no longer only how to rally public attention after a shooting, but how to respond when repeated exposure begins to dull the emotional force of each new tragedy.
Flash, a 17-year-old who has been involved with United Playaz since childhood, described a similar shift in his own communities in Daly City, where he spent his initial childhood years, and now in SoMa, San Francisco. “They hear gunshots every day, it’s normal,” he said, referring to the children, who have grown up in an environment where gun violence is a routine occurrence.
For other teenagers, that familiarity shows up at school. Max Wendling and Marco Rigio, members of the teen-led Teens on Target initiative, described the uneasy way such incidents quickly get absorbed into student life.
“When you hear about someone bringing a gun to school, you don’t really think about it too much,” one of them said. “You’re like, “Oh, that happens sometimes”.
Varnika Arun, a member of the Santa Clara County Youth Task Force Commission, pointed to the cumulative effect of constant exposure. “We hear about it so often in the news and we’re always practicing these lockdown drills, which normalizes this behavior and makes the possibility [of a shooting] very real.”
Psychologist Lisa Pescara-Kovach, whose recent article When Headlines Become Blueprints for Violence examines how repeated exposure to violent events can shape public response, said these students’ reactions are not unusual. In fact, they are consistent with what psychologists see when repeated exposure to violence, or habituation, begins to reshape how young people process threat.
Young people may begin to create emotional distance as a way of coping, especially when violence feels both inescapable and uncontrollable. That does not necessarily mean they are indifferent.
In some cases, it may be a protective response to living with constant threat — something Kaelyn Tan, another member of the Santa Clara County Youth Task Force Commission, sees in her peers. “People are so desensitized, they don’t really know how to process it anymore,” she said. “I think they’re trying to suppress those emotions to protect their peace of mind because it’s hard. We’re still young people.”
Why some youth still act and others don’t
Repeated exposure produces varied responses.
Flash, put it simply: “When you aren’t affected by something, it may not concern you as much.” Another reason, highlighted by Tan, is that even among teenagers who do care, concern does not always become action. Wendling and Rigio said that many students do want to do something, but often don’t know where to begin or lack the access or resources that would help them turn concern into action.
Adding to that, Arun emphasized the value of feeling connected to support systems like adults, organizations or peers who can help youth channel fear and frustration into something constructive. Yet, Tan said that for others, the barrier to act is more emotional than logistical; some people begin to accept a “we’re doomed” mindset, assuming that nothing is really going to change.
Everett Butler, a justice program manager at United Playaz, sees a similar divide from another angle. What draws many young people toward violence, he said, is not only anger but the search for “acceptance,” “support,” and “a brotherhood.”
The same needs, he suggests, can also determine whether a young person turns toward activism, mentorship or a gun. Bosley has seen that complexity too. Even young people who have experienced profound loss, he said, do not always “take things to the next level” politically. Grief, in this sense, can both mobilize or overwhelm.
How activism is recalibrating
Besides personal factors that influence whether young people act, a great deal has changed nationally since 2018. Organizers say those political and structural shifts have forced gun violence activism to reset.
For instance, Bosley reports that March For Our Lives has lost some of the energy that came from being loud and visible as the political environment became less hospitable. Funding cuts, he said, forced violence prevention groups to become “very creative” about how they save lives. That has meant shifting toward more action-based work and deeper collaboration between organizations. “If you don’t have funds, but you have enough for a bus, and I don’t have funds, but I have a location where you can do your teachings, then we have to partner up,” Bosley says.
Accountability campaigns changed too.
“Just calling them out doesn’t do the same that it did before,” Bosley said, describing how the movement has shifted from moral appeals toward more strategic efforts, involving legal pressure and policies that target the gun industry financially.
One example is the proposed RIFLE Act, which would require manufacturers whose guns are frequently recovered at crime scenes to pay for violence prevention efforts. “They’re profiting off of our death,” he said. “So now we’re going to start making them fund the prevention measures that’s needed.”
The movement, overall, has also decentralized into a network of smaller, practical interventions. At United Playaz, that movement takes the form of community, routine and refuge – “a place that feels like “family” for many people”, said Flash. Depending on available funding, Corpuz also periodically organizes gun buybacks, besides focusing on workforce development, after-school programming, crisis response, and case management. For Everett, it means sitting with youth in juvenile hall and asking them to “play the tape out” before acting on impulse, a method to encourage youth to think about the consequences of inflicting violence and what they can do differently. While for teenagers, activism ranges from social media awareness campaigns to involvement in student commissions, and conversations with local policymakers.
Why Media Attention No Longer Sustains the Movement
The movement can no longer rely on media attention to carry it the way it did in 2018, when images of student walkouts and mass protests ricocheted through social media and national news coverage, helping inspire similar demonstrations elsewhere. Organizers say that cycle is harder to sustain now, in part, because gun violence appears in the news so often that each new shooting struggles to hold public attention for long.
That shift matters because media coverage shapes not just how young people process gun violence, but whether the public is galvanized to take action at all.
Youth activists say that besides frequent coverage, the problem lies in how little depth the news often offers. “The narrative around all these things should move beyond body counts and basic facts” Tan says. Youth want to understand “why these things are happening and what can be done to prevent them.”
