With the number of gun deaths every year, America is at war with itself. Our objective was to bring justice to the children and their families who are affected by the nationwide epidemic, like Manuel and Patricia Oliver, who founded Change the Ref after their son, Joaquin, was killed in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. With that goal in mind, we decided to target individuals who work with a major institution responsible for keeping guns unchecked, the National Rifle Association and their $250 million per year lobbying budget. With this project, we aimed to hold pro-gun advocates accountable for their work and use their influence against them to spark a nationwide conversation about the need for common sense gun legislation.

Gun violence is a leading cause of death among children and teens in the US. Public support for common sense gun laws has gained momentum. But those efforts have been countered by groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), which spends about $250MM per year on its advocacy programs, far more than all the gun control advocacy groups combined.

This year, 3,044 members of the high school class of 2021 didn’t graduate because they were killed by a gun. So we held a graduation ceremony for this group of students, which became known as The Lost Class. We then invited David Keene, former NRA President, and John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, to deliver the commencement speech. While they thought they were attending a dress rehearsal for a real graduation, they were actually speaking to the students who would never get the chance to cross the stage because of the work of these pro-gun activists. The stunt was featured by media on both sides of the political spectrum and sparked a nationwide conversation about common sense laws.

Guns kill 38,826 people each year. There’s been a 17% increase over a decade in deaths due to firearms. The average cost for overall gun violence in the United States is $860 for every person.

Numbers are powerful, but they can also be numbing. We experience mass shooting stories one-by-one, and unless it happens near us, it can feel like a far-off problem. To convey the horror of gun violence to the general public and apply pressure on legislators to pass common sense gun laws, we needed to find a common reference point that would speak to a wide swath of Americans. After going back through historic CDC data, we were able to calculate how many students meant to graduate this year were killed by a gun and use the graduation season to make the loss relevant to millions of people around the country.

To put on a graduation for The Lost Class, we first created James Madison Academy, a fake online high school named after the author of the Second Amendment. We then invited David Keene, former NRA President, and John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, to make the school’s commencement speech. We filmed their speeches during what they believed was a dress rehearsal in front of 3,044 empty white chairs. But really, they were speaking to the 3,044 students who couldn’t graduate this year because they were killed by a gun. Within a few days, we filmed and edited the graduation videos and released them for the world to debate. The ocean of empty chairs visually accompanied by two prominent gun rights advocates sparked an international conversation around background checks.

We relied solely on donated media and achieved a massive amount of impressions – 1.4 Billion in total. BuzzFeed broke the news, which led to a same-day dedicated segment on the Rachel Maddow Show, and overnight coverage in top-tier global news, including CNN, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Hill, and more. A-Listers like Katie Couric and Demi Lovato spread the word on our behalf – without us doing any outreach which helped us to reach that mainstream audience we knew we needed to engage if this was going to work. We garnered 1.2 billion social media impressions; 9000+% increase in daily mentions of Change the Ref days after launch and 2161% increase over the first two weeks. In total, we got over 40,00 petition signatures. And we succeeded in driving the conversation about the need for background checks, achieving a 66% increase vs the previous week.