In a time that now seems long ago, students took to the streets to protest a war that was killing members of their generation. It took more than kids with placards to end the Vietnam conflict, but the breadth and persistence of the antiwar movement in the 1960s helped galvanize pressure on a resistant government.

Another youth movement is brewing now, and one that deserves close attention and encouragement. After yet another school massacre carried out by a disturbed young man who had legally obtained an assault weapon, children and teenagers across the country are rising up to announce what a majority of the country believes: that the time has come for gun control.

Friday on the Vineyard, students at the regional high school will stage a walkout at 1:45 p.m. in solidarity with those grieving the loss of 13 students and three adults killed last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And on March 24, students and others from the Island plan to travel to Washington for a March for Our Lives rally, organized by classmates of those killed in Florida.

Occurring 18 years after an equally horrific incident in Columbine, Colo., and more than a dozen other mass school shootings since, the Parkland tragedy underscores the grim reality that kids born since the millennium have had to accept gun violence as a risk in going to school each day.

It is fitting and overdue that those most affected by the succession of school shootings and especially the climate of fear they have engendered should be taking up a campaign that so far has been ineffectual. The arguments against a nationwide ban on assault weapons seem less and less supportable as the toll of children killed with rifles built for warfare continues to mount.

Here in Massachusetts, sales of semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 used in Parkland have been banned for two decades. No one is arguing that banning sales of these weapons elsewhere will eliminate them entirely, but it will surely make it harder for deranged people to get and use them against children. It is no coincidence that Massachusetts, with among the lowest rates of gun ownership, also has the lowest incidence of gun deaths in the nation.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that 66 per cent of Americans now favor stricter gun laws, the highest level of support for gun control ever measured by the poll. By comparison, polls taken during the Vietnam War era never found more than 60 per cent of Americans taking the view that the war was wrong.

Tragically, public opinion polls, statistical evidence and rational discussion have failed to persuade lawmakers to take obvious steps to reduce gun violence. But perhaps they will listen to the children, if enough of them here and elsewhere can raise and sustain their voices.

Like the act of voting, small activities undertaken by enough like-minded people over a long enough period can lead to social change. Children need to be protected, but they also need to know they have power to make the world they are inheriting better.