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This Parkland student quickly amassed more Twitter followers than the NRA. Here’s what she’s been writing.

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March 1, 2018 at 11:17 p.m. EST
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma González comforts a classmate during a CNN town hall meeting on Feb. 21 in Sunrise, Fla. (Michael Laughlin/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

@Emma4Change is high school senior Emma González, 18, who has quickly become a national figure since she became a vocal proponent of gun control after surviving the Feb. 14 killings of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

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She joined Twitter this month and already has 1.15 million followers. The National Rifle Association, which she opposes and which has long opposed gun-control measures,  joined the social media platform in February 2009. It has 606,000 Twitter followers.

González has become a leader of the growing student movement to push for changes in gun control at the state and federal level. Already some legislatures are taking action, and numerous businesses have severed ties with the NRA. She has made speeches at rallies and appeared on numerous news shows to talk about gun control and urge citizen activism.

At a Fort Lauderdale rally three days after the shooting, she told hundreds of classmates, teachers and others:

Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed, but our laws have not …
We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because … we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That’s going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook, and it’s going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

When bullets were fired at a high school in Dalton, Ga., this week, and when she and other students returned to Parkland for the first time after the shootings, and when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) called for more metal detectors and other security measures at school, she took to Twitter. Here are some of the things she has been tweeting and retweeting.

Here are some of her tweets:

And this was her reaction on Feb. 28 after Scott said: “We’ve got to invest in metal detectors. We’ve got to invest in bulletproof glass. We’ve got to invest in steel doors. We’ve got to invest in upgraded locks.”

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