By now, the NRA is banking on us having moved on from the last massacre.

The images have started to fade from the latest grisly horror show in which innocent people -- just like you or me -- are mowed down in a public place by a madman with a gun raining bullets on a crowd. They are betting that the scene isn’t as shocking as it was 18 years ago at Columbine High School.

We’re so familiar with the subsequent “thoughts and prayers” stanza that it starts trending on Twitter before the body count is finalized. And the hubris of the National Rifle Association is so great that it is scheduled to begin running ads in Virginia’s gubernatorial race eight days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Those of us still disgusted, heartbroken and angry about Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, San Bernardino, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora -- and yes, Columbine -- can find hope in the NRA’s calculated disregard of the dead.

The powerful gun lobby, which opposes virtually every form of gun regulation, is drunk on its $36 million investment in a winning presidential candidate and a Republican-controlled Congress willing to kneel before its demands. And why not? While a horrified public has watched mass shootings increase, lawmakers at state and federal levels continue to make it easier to buy and carry guns. It’s easy to look at this trend and say that if Congress couldn’t pass universal background checks after the mass slaughter of first-graders in their classrooms, then nothing will ever move them to enact policies that will reduce gun-related deaths.

That’s a fundamental miscalculation of how this type of social change will happen. The NRA has unquestionable spending power, with an annual operating budget of about a quarter of a billion dollars and the ability to spend 15 times as much on campaign contributions as gun control advocates. Its greatest strength, however, is its energized and committed base willing to call and write legislators and vote on unfettered access to guns as a single issue.

But the NRA’s managed to galvanize more than just its base; it’s galvanized mothers.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Shannon Watts founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. They started with 4,500 active members and now have 60,000. There are active, committed volunteers in every state, including deep-red ones like Missouri. Congressional candidates are coming to these Moms meetings in St. Louis and organizing on the issue of gun safety laws. That has happened through the power of grassroots action, by an expanding platform on social media and by the growing disgust every time there’s another senseless attack.

Our society isn’t building up a tolerance to gun violence; it’s building up to a tipping point against it.

In our lifetimes, policies on all sorts of issues have moved in ways that people didn’t think were possible. Look at the change in public attitudes toward gay marriage, smoking and health care. Now, we’re seeing the beginnings of a similar shift on gun safety. Public attitudes are shaped by a growing number of voices saying “enough.”

Mainstream late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel nearly broke down during an emotional monologue the day after the attack in Las Vegas. He talked convincingly and from the heart about the need for basic, common-sense gun reform. That is not the sort of testimony America has seen from a comedian.

The same day, a country music guitarist -- who played at the outdoor concert where he saw a gunman kill 59 and injure more than 500 people -- publicly defected from the NRA crowd.

“I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd Amendment my whole life,” Caleb Keeter wrote on Twitter, “until the events of last night. I can’t express how wrong I was.”

The lead guitarist for the Texas-based Josh Abbott Band noted, “We actually have members of our crew with (concealed handgun licenses), and legal firearms on the bus. They were useless,” he wrote. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us.”

He summed up what so many Americans have felt: ”Enough is enough.”

This is the NRA’s base slowly starting to turn away from propaganda. Multiple studies show a downward trend in gun ownership among American households over the past 20 years. About 90 percent of Americans support background checks for every gun sale. Nine states have universal background checks.

With each attack, it’s harder to convince the public that a person’s right to own a semiautomatic assault weapon outweighs a child’s right to not be killed at school. Each time there’s a gruesome attack and Congress takes no action, it moves the needle. Every election where the NRA flaunts its multimillion-dollar moneybags in the wake of a national tragedy, it motivates voters to push back against absolute power.

No political party stays in power forever.

An army of mothers, a late-night comedian and a country band guitarist will help bring about the change that so many believe is out of reach.

Stick around for the long game.

The protests about police shootings haven’t stopped in the heartland. Two weeks after a St. Louis judge issued a not-guilty verdict in the Jason Stockley trial, there have been protests in malls, before concerts and baseball games, and in schools.

Many of the high schoolers who walked out of their suburban St. Louis classrooms to protest the Stockley verdict were in middle school when teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot.

The anguished reaction in the streets three years ago captured the world’s attention, but it made an indelible impression on the newest generation of emerging social activists.

Theirs is an adolescence punctuated by protests. It’s a coming-of-age experience vastly different from their Generation X parents, like myself, who were too young or not yet born during the Vietnam War protests. We were even further removed from the civil rights movement, which belonged to our parents’ generation.

Today’s parents, in our mid-30s to early 50s, lacked the visceral experience as teenagers of watching police, in militarized vehicles, firing tear gas on crowds and making mass arrests in the malls we hung out in, in the streets familiar to us.

Our children’s perspective on how to impact social change is being shaped by the experiences they are living through. And what a tumultuous few years it’s been.

Today’s young teens growing up in the middle of the country have watched a national movement against racial inequality and police brutality spring from civil unrest in their own area. They watched students at their state’s flagship institution -- the University of Missouri -- challenge the administration’s response to racism on campus and saw the football team unite to bring down a university president.

The few degrees of separation in cities like St. Louis mean that social media feeds, filled with images of protests, likely involve someone they know or someone to whom they can find a mutual connection. They may have marched in the largest single-day mass protest in American history, joining between 4 to 5 million people participating in women’s marches across the country a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. That was soon followed by hundreds of thousands of people at airports nationwide demonstrating against the administration’s travel ban.  

And, most recently, amid two weeks of daily protests since a judge found former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley not guilty of murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, #TakeAKnee also started trending. NFL athletes silently kneeling during the playing of the national anthem have inspired similar protests against racial inequality and injustice on high school and college fields across the country.

From pop culture to social media to sports, everything is intensely political.

These students have also seen the backlash to this activism and the growing polarization in civil society. They may have something to learn from previous generations who fought similar battles. Those who were 16 in 1963 when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech are 70 now. They may remember that the historic march, now taught with reverence as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, took place against a backdrop of fear and suspicion.  

In the 10 weeks before the 1963 March on Washington, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests, according to the Justice Department. A Gallup poll taken before the march found that the majority of Americans were against it -- viewing it unfavorably, thinking it wouldn’t accomplish anything, or believing that it would end in violence.

In addition to the power of their civil disobedience, that generation also learned that the most potent protests happened at the ballot box.

It remains to be seen if today’s 16-year-olds will harness that same political muscle when they are old enough to cast ballots. This generation after the millennials, Generation Z, makes up a quarter of the U.S. population. They are a larger cohort than the baby boomers or millennials.

Given their collective formative experiences so far, this generation will not accept a return to a status quo their parents accepted. They are armed with technology, including social media, to organize and amplify their voices, and a courage to stand up for their beliefs that has been tested and proven to be strong.

This generation is getting loud.

And they won’t be ignored.

When I want to approach a complicated topic with my children, I've found it's best to start with a question.

When I picked up my daughter from high school last Friday, I asked what she had heard about the Jason Stockley verdict. That was the day Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, was acquitted in the 2011 shooting death of black motorist Anthony Lamar Smith.

She said that earlier in the day, an upperclassman had yelled out, "Black lives don't matter!" He was quickly challenged by peers, and the incident didn't escalate. She didn't find out more about the verdict until after school.

That wasn't a reaction I expected in this large, suburban high school where a quarter of the students are minorities.

"That was a terrible thing to say," I said. Some teenagers say stupid things, she reminded me. I handed her my phone and asked her to read an article about the verdict that discussed the multiple shades of "reasonableness" the judge had to consider -- what constitutes "reasonable" fear that justifies using lethal force by the police and the legal standard of guilty beyond a "reasonable" doubt.   

One of the first things my daughter said was that the verdict wasn't fair. Children are highly attuned to the idea of fairness.

Parents cannot shield kids from videos that circulate on social media about police shootings. In this case there was audio of Stockley saying he was "going to kill this (expletive)," along with police video that showed him rifling through a bag in his police vehicle after the shooting and returning to search Smith’s car before saying he found the gun.

I reminded her that we didn't hear all the testimony nor did we see the evidence that was presented during the trial. There is, however, an undeniable pattern and evidence that the system favors the police when they use fatal force, and that black men are disproportionately treated worse in police encounters than whites, I said. The widespread use of videos to capture it and social media to share it has brought the issue to the fore.

We talked about what it meant that the judge wrote in his verdict, "Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”

Would he make the same assumption about "suburban" heroin dealers, which we surely know exist, given the widespread heroin epidemic?

By their early and mid-teens, you want your child to begin to see the world in its contradictions and wrestle with the causes: We rely on an imperfect criminal justice system. People have a right to safely protest and should do so without hurting others or their property. Some people will be more outraged about vandalism than police aggression or injustice. And, yes, the police are there to protect us, but that's not how everyone is treated.

A friend described how she responded when her five- and seven-year-olds asked what happened in the news. They were sitting on the sofa, and she was scrolling through the news coverage on her phone when they looked over her shoulder and asked. Her children are white.

She told them that a police officer had killed a man, but he was not going to jail for it and that people were hurt and upset about that. The inevitable follow-up was: How can that happen?

She said to them that sometimes people are treated differently based on the color of their skin. She compared it to bullying, a concept younger children have already heard about.

"Protests are a way of (talking to) a system that is bullying people (and telling it) to stop," she said. The difficult thing for her is also making sure that her children don't fear the police because of what they are hearing and seeing. "I want them to know if they are ever in trouble, they need to go to the police officers."

If it's a difficult conversation for white parents, it's even harder for parents of black and brown children. Or those who live in communities where the threats to them are less theoretical and more immediate concerns. The Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri published a video last year encouraging dialogue, establishing a sense of safety for kids and promoting positive coping skills when dealing with media coverage of community racial trauma and civil unrest.

The point of such conversations is to help children understand the world better, learn healthy coping skills and resilience, figure out how to deal with competing information and to develop more compassion.

When I asked my younger child, who is in middle school, what he had heard about the case, he said not a single teacher or student had mentioned it. All he knew was from bits and pieces he had seen in the news.

There's a place to start.