SANDPOINT – There are some in this nation who wish the “Parkland Kids” would just go away. When told, with a dismissive wave, that it was “too soon” to speak out after 17 of their classmates were killed by a semi-automatic-rifle-wielding gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, they ignored authority and spoke out anyway.

The audacity of youth has worked in their favor since these young people took the public dialog into their own hands. They achieved what countless others have been unable to and have overcome the resistance of a phalanx of politicians and lobbyists trying to hold them back.

On March 24, an estimated 800,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., to place the issue squarely in the nation’s face. More to the point, these kids took what could have been a one-off rally and turned it into what might well become the tipping point for change.

Among the crush of people who attended that “March for Our Lives” rally were several Sandpoint residents who traveled east to show their support. Back home, they have become part of a conversation that has pulled the issue of gun laws out of the shadows and cast it into the glaring light of national discourse.

“The five of us went to the march to advocate for common sense gun laws, not banning guns or taking away gun rights,” said Ben Tate, who went to D.C. with Dan Bartlett, Rhonda Tate, Sue Haynes and Jacki Crossingham. “The fact is, most of us own guns.”

Tate’s concern has been mounting since Dec. 14, 2012, when another shooter with an assortment of semi-automatic weapons killed 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Surely, Tate thought, this kind of obscene slaughter would cause the country to rethink whether weapons built for the battlefield should be so easily available to the general public.

Ironically, the very youth of those murdered was used as a weapon, as a movement grew behind sweeping the killing of children out of the news cycle as quickly as possible. Grieving parents and loved ones who attempted to speak out for the mere babes who couldn’t do it for themselves were pilloried for their efforts. Worse, conspiracy theories cropped up that took their devastating loss and made it a mockery of human decency.

“If Sandy Hook can’t move the needle, what does that say about us?” Tate said. “When we couldn’t get anything done after the horror of Sandy Hook, I lost hope for this country and its institutions and people.”

As the mass shooting headlines piled up – Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas and more – the mantra “too soon to talk about it” started to wear thin.

By the time the Parkland, Fla., shooting happened, the teenagers who survived were in no mood to listen to their elders and keep quiet. And with the March For Our Lives, these same high school kids rallied like-minded elders to stand behind them as they brazenly confronted politicians and the gun lobby.

For Tate, attending the rally wasn’t about having the courage to speak up, it was something deeper.

“It’s about empathy,” he said. “We need to get the empathy going for all these poor families who have to deal with this.”

Listening to the young speakers that day, he was moved by their ability to effectively communicate what adults had failed to address. Their message was raw and unedited.

“When I heard the 11-year-old girl say, ‘I learned to duck bullets in first grade before I learned to read,’ tears were coming out of my eyes,’” said Tate.

Not content to make a splash and disappear, the young people behind the march have leveraged social media like never before to keep their message in the forefront, while continuously rallying their age group to be the face of change in America. One of their main tools, it appears, will be mobilizing the youth vote – a demographic that usually delivers abysmal turnout at the polls.

“They did harp on the fact that only 18 percent of this age group actually votes,” Tate said. “That number is pretty pathetic and that resonated with me.

“But everywhere you turned,” he went on, “there were people registering young people to vote.”

So far, the Parkland kids have avoided having their message hijacked. When called out by critics who twist their words, they have exacted instant reprisal via social media, surprising many talking heads and toppling some others with their ability to push back in real time.

The biggest transgression, in the eyes of some, has been these kids’ unrelenting attack on the NRA and the public airing of which politicians receive money from the gun lobby group and how such affiliation is reflected in their gun-related voting record. One has only to check the mailbox these days to see how that relationship is still being touted as a decided plus by many candidates for office. Increasingly, however, there is a sense that waving the banner of an A+ voting rating from the NRA might come back to haunt them in both primaries and the general election.

The Parkland students, meanwhile, are doing everything in their power to make sure that happens. At the D.C. rally, thousands of them wore ‘price tags’ intended to show what their lives were worth to politicians. For the Florida kids, the tags read, “$1.05” – a figure arrived at by taking how much money that state’s politicians received from the NRA and dividing it by the number of students there. The tags called out Marco Rubio by name.

In Idaho, the price tags – promoted heavily on the March For Our Lives website – read, “$1.22” and mention U.S. Congressman Mike Simpson by name, along with the tag line, “Don’t put a price on us.” Bolder still, these kids have a click-through donation button that allows them to “buy their lives back” by supporting the group’s push to vote NRA-backed politicians out of office in the mid-term elections and beyond.

As someone who grew up around firearms and who has no problem at all with hunting and recreational shooting, Tate remembers when the National Rifle Association focused on teaching gun owners how to safely use handguns and hunting rifles. In those days, the constituency was the average gun owner and the current furor over whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms included military grade weapons such as the AR-15 that hit the headlines by dent of its ability to shoot rounds of bullets in rapid fire was not yet on the radar.

“But it all changed with (NRA Executive Vice President) Wayne LaPierre,” Tate said. “That’s when the NRA shifted from things like hunter safety education to being the lobbying group for the gun industry.”

Politicians also changed, he added, as the lobbying group started investing millions of dollars – $419 million in the 2016 election year alone – in political contributions and financing legislative programs.

“Now, all the NRA cares about is using that money to keep legislators in their place,” Tate said. “But I don’t think it’s just the money – it’s the fear of losing their jobs. If these politicians go up against the gun lobby, they won’t win.”

Unless, that is, a new breed of younger voters floods the system and pushes re-set. At this stage, the March For Our Lives movement has been able to avoid being depicted as crazy, gun-hating extremists by sticking to its agenda of pushing for universal background checks and taking weapons of war off of the nation’s streets.

Increasingly, that focused message is finding an audience in voters who make a distinction between gun ownership and the public danger posed by high power semi-automatic weapons coupled with high capacity magazines.

“I’m sure an AR-15 is fun to blast away with, but doesn’t the life of one child equal hundreds of times what that fun might be worth?” asked Tate. “One of the arguments the gun lobby makes is that ‘it’s a slippery slope.’ But I’m not saying take the guns away and I think ‘the government is coming’ excuse is really weak.”

More than the policy matters involved, more than the heated emotions surrounding the issue, Tate has been drawn into this conversation by the young people whose plea has caught the attention of older generations.

Yes, the sheer size of the crowd in D.C. was breathtaking. The eloquence of the speakers – some still in elementary and middle school – was impressive. But it was the small moments and random images that stuck with him on the trip home and still today.

Images such as the 10-year-old carrying a hand-made poster that read, “One child is worth more than all the guns in the world.”

Somehow, these children have rekindled hope in a man who had all but lost it. That’s why he showed up in D.C. That’s why he’s still talking about the issue back at home.

“We have to keep the flame going,” he said. “Do we really have to have another big slaughter?”