Gun Reform Youth Movement

The gun reform youth movement formed in February 2018, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Surviving students organized publicly and rapidly, and the movement is distinguished from earlier gun policy advocacy by who led it.

The organizational structure

Within months the movement had become two legally separate organizations, with tax-exempt rulings in August and September 2018: a 501(c)(3) foundation and a separately incorporated action fund. That is the standard structure for advocacy that wants both charitable status and the ability to engage in political activity, and it is worth naming because the two file separately and are subject to different rules.

Reported revenue:

Fiscal year	Foundation	Action Fund
2021	$1.2M	$4.1M
2022	$2.3M	$7.3M
2023	$1.4M	$3.6M

Both entities’ revenue peaked in FY2022 and fell in FY2023. These are small organizations by the standards of the advocacy sector — the Sierra Club, cited on the environmentalists page, reports revenue two orders of magnitude larger.

Legislation

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was enacted on June 25, 2022. It is the federal firearms legislation passed during the period this movement was active.

This page records that fact and makes no causal claim about it. Attributing a statute to a movement is exactly the kind of claim that the sources cited here cannot support, and the previous version of this page made several of them.

What was removed

The previous version asserted specific turnout figures for the 2018 demonstrations, social media reach figures, and effects on voter registration and legislation. None was sourced. Turnout estimates for that mobilization do exist in the Crowd Counting Consortium’s dataset and could be cited properly; the unsourced figures have been removed rather than retained pending that.