On Valentine’s Day 2018, Jaclyn Corin, now 24, sheltered in a classroom while a former student shot and killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—including Corin’s 14-year-old friend Jaime Guttenberg—and wounded 17 more. In the wake of what came to be known as the Parkland shooting, Corin, then a junior and her class president, helped organize a two-day trip for 100 students to Florida’s capital city Tallahassee to press elected officials for gun-safety reform and co-founded the organization March For Our Lives. On March 24, 2018, an estimated 800,000 people joined the first march in Washington, D.C., while 800 other marches took place around the U.S.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Since then, Corin has completed degrees at Harvard and Oxford, interned at the Biden White House, and had a brief stint as management consultant. Earlier this year she was appointed executive director of March For Our Lives. She talked to TIME from D.C. about the way the gun lobby and resistance movements have changed and why the group is organizing a social media, petition, and advertising campaign calling out “Parkland Pam,” the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
You’ve recently taken over the leadership of the organization you co-founded. What are you hoping to achieve?
The gun-violence-prevention movement has evolved significantly since 2018. We have been able to accomplish a lot; over 300 gun-safety laws were passed on the state level, the NRA was effectively bankrupted, and young people really started to prioritize gun-violence prevention as a key political issue. But as urgency faded in the public eye, in some ways, the crisis deepened. In the time of all the federal progress, we saw the gun lobby adapting. It moved away from the NRA bluster and towards a quieter, more dangerous strategy, of dismantling enforcement and targeting vulnerable communities with militarized marketing. So we are focusing on accountability, going back to the real human impacts of this issue, so as to not let those we’ve lost or been damaged by this issue go forgotten.
Do you see the NRA as defanged permanently or just dealing with a setback?
March For Our Lives played a major role in taking down the NRA. We exposed their corruption. We filed a legal complaint that led to Wayne LaPierre’s downfall, and since we marched in 2018 they’ve lost over a million members and nearly half of their revenue, but the larger infrastructure of the gun lobby has not weakened. It has diversified and become more difficult to track. The most alarming shift is the lobby’s strategic focus on eroding enforcement. The absence of enforcement, especially under attorneys general like Pam Bondi, has created a de facto deregulation that makes it easier for illegal gun dealers, domestic abusers, and others to access deadly weapons when they shouldn’t.
U.S. Attorney General Bondi was the attorney general of Florida at the time of the Parkland shooting. Did you meet with her in the aftermath?
Yes. One week after the shooting, I sat across from Pam Bondi with nine friends as a grieving 17-year-old, still processing the loss of my classmates, and she looked us in the eye and told us she was with us. I was disturbed that she kept moving the conversation from guns to a hollow school-safety message, and yet, because of the political conditions and conversation in Florida, she ended up publicly supporting measures like red-flag laws and raising the age to buy a firearm in Florida from 18 to 21. But once the cameras were gone and her political career advanced, she quietly reversed course.
Have you asked her about the differences between the Florida legislation that she endorsed and the types of rules that she’s endorsing now?
I wrote her a letter, and we sent it to her team last week, but we have yet to receive a response. We are initiating a campaign to publicly showcase the hypocrisy she has demonstrated. It’s not about vengeance, but rather accountability: if she’s not willing to meet with us and reckon with the promises she made back in 2018, then we will continue to call out the discrepancies in what she has claimed she will deliver and what she is actually doing.
What were the promises she made in 2018?
She didn’t make specific promises in our meeting, but publicly, she did advertise her fervent support of those red-flag laws and raising the age to buy a firearm, and more than that, she consistently reiterated her commitment to supporting victims and families. I couldn’t think of a worse way to support victims and families than to destroy all of the progress the gun-violence-prevention movement has made over the last few years. [TIME’s request for comment to the Attorney General’s office went unanswered.]
Is there a reason you call out Bondi over somebody like Senator Rick Scott, who was governor of Florida then, and passed some of those red-flag laws?
Rick Scott is certainly on my sh-t list, but Pam Bondi represents a unique and deeply personal betrayal, both for me and the Parkland community at large. She was the first official I met with formally after the shooting. And her words carried weight for me because they were delivered directly to survivors in this moment of both national and personal crisis. She [publicly] made specific commitments, and then actively dismantled the very safeguards she once said she supported.
Can you name two or three things that she has done since becoming U.S. Attorney General that you feel are a betrayal of the assurances she gave you?
She has supported budget cuts to the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms]. She has destroyed funding for community-based violence-intervention programs that are proven to reduce gun violence in the communities most impacted by it, and she has gotten rid of the ATF zero-tolerance enforcement policy for rogue gun dealers who repeatedly break the law and supply weapons used in crimes. Back in 2018 she constantly reiterated that she wanted to make sure that rogue gun dealers didn’t get away with literal murder, but now she is dismantling the policies that would make that possible.
Governor Ron DeSantis said recently that he wants to repeal Florida’s red-flag laws. Does that alarm you?
It’s true that Ron DeSantis has tried to push for the repeal of red-flag laws and reduce the age to buy a firearm back down from 21 to 18. So in response to that threat, which happened to occur around the time of the shooting at Florida State University, where a number of Parkland survivors then survived their second mass shooting, March For Our Lives convened a group of folks from both Parkland and the FSU community to sign a letter to DeSantis, demanding that he veto that legislation to roll back the progress we made if it were to ever reach his desk.
How do you stay positive and hopeful when you see the kind of progress that you made being whittled away?
It’s devastating. I can’t lie. There are days where I’m so exhausted and feel defeated. But for every elected official who breaks their promises, I’ve met dozens of young people who have proceeded to organize voter drives or start local coalitions or show up to town halls and begin conversations with their friends and community about what public safety should look like.
Are you in touch with other survivors? Do you guys hang?
I think surviving a mass shooting breeds closeness that can’t be replicated. So I have stayed in close touch with many people, David Hogg included. Those friendships definitely make the aftereffects of experiencing a trauma like that a bit lighter.
How many have moved on to other things?
Most of the other co-founders of MFOL have moved on to other things. There are two co-founders, one of them being David, who are still heavily involved with the organization. Sometimes it’s hard to be in a space like this for so long and stay personally committed to the mission to end gun violence. So they just exercise that commitment differently in their lives.
Is there something that keeps you awake at night about the outlook for your generation or among your peers?
I think there is a disillusionment among my generation with regard to American politics. By the time many of us hit 30, Donald Trump will have had influence over our politics for nearly half of our lives. We’ve grown up in a society where that is the case and where we feel like many of our efforts—whether voting or organizing or talking to family members—go nowhere. But that’s part of why I wanted to come back to lead March For Our Lives, because I think we can reinvigorate our generation so long as we are calling out the people who are doing us wrong as much as we are lifting up one another and inspiring true hope. I think seeing one person step up and make a difference makes all the difference in inspiring others to do the same.
With the benefit of seven years’ hindsight, is there anything you would do differently now in the immediate aftermath of the shooting?
That’s a hard one to answer, because on the one hand, the raw authenticity and pure anger that was at the forefront of all of our communications back then made March For Our Lives so compelling. We were kids, 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, who were speaking from the heart and not delivering polished talking points. But I suppose in hindsight, I would tell both myself and all of us that progress is going to take a long time. We genuinely thought that we were going to end gun violence within a year or two. So I would tell us to slow down a little bit and celebrate even the slight progress we were able to make. That potentially would have helped me close my computer at a reasonable time of night.
I know that David Hogg and X Gonzalez attracted a lot of criticism and even harassment. Has any of that come your way?
X and David were the main two faces of the movement, but I personally experienced a number of death threats. I had the FBI on the speed dial. Getting involved in the gun-violence-prevention movement is scary, because I know what comes with putting your name out there. And I know so many women especially experience unique, horrific threats when they are to speak out for what they believe in. But there are thousands of innocent Americans, many of them children, who never got the chance to speak out about gun violence before their life was ended by it, so I am committing to continuing the fight.
You went to Harvard for your undergraduate and Oxford for your master’s. The world was your oyster. Was there a little bit of you that was like, do I go back to this gun-violence space? It’s such a difficult issue and it attracts a lot of negative attention.
At Harvard, there’s a competitiveness that blooms in the air where, if you don’t join McKinsey, Bain, or BCG or have an active plan to go to law school, then you are failing. Immediately after I graduated from Harvard, I was a White House intern for the Biden Administration, and I had secured a job in management consulting [after graduation] a month into my time at Oxford. I worked in management consulting, in a public-sector department. I hated it, because it felt like I was not contributing to something bigger than me. And I recognized about myself that I wanted to have my hands on the clay and play an active role in molding it. So when the opportunity arose to lead March For Our Lives into its next chapter, I quit my consulting job at the six-month mark, and I am not regretful. This is exactly where I’m supposed to be right now in my life.