Maxwell Frost, a 25-Year-Old Gun Control Activist, Heads to Congress

Don’t let his tender age fool you: Maxwell Alejandro Frost has been doing this for a while.

Frost was only 15 when the Sandy Hook shooting horrified him and inspired him to get involved in political activism; he flew to Connecticut as a high school kid to figure out how he could help. A decade later, as a not-so-grizzled veteran of various progressive causes, he will soon be the youngest member of Congress — and its first denizen of Generation Z.

Frost, who turns 26 in January, won his safely Democratic seat in Orlando after dispatching two former members of Congress, a state senator and a pastor in a fierce primary. And if he has stars in his eyes about filling the shoes of Representative Val Demings, a former police chief who made a futile run for Senate against Marco Rubio, he betrayed little of it in an interview last week.

Frost said his freshman orientation was “surreal” — training sessions with the House Progressive Caucus and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., dinner at the Library of Congress, a midnight tour of the Capitol. But as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the Gen Z anti-gun-violence group, he is no stranger to Washington’s corridors of power.

“I’ve never been on the House floor,” Frost said. “But I’ve been in the office buildings, I’ve been in the Capitol. I’ve been coming up here pretty often since 2012, which is the Sandy Hook shooting. And I would come every year for the vigil for all victims of gun violence.”

Frost has already hired a veteran Capitol Hill operator as his chief of staff and is putting together the rest of his team in Washington and back home in Orlando. Progressive leaders like Benjamin Jealous, the former N.A.A.C.P. president, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have embraced him as one of their own.

But Frost is most eager to get to work on the issue that brought him to Washington: addressing gun violence. He wants Congress to invest in programs to engage young people in music or boxing — anything to keep them out of trouble. Maybe, he thinks, he can find some bipartisan support for his ideas even while Democrats are in the minority in the House.

“What I learned in March for Our Lives is that when we invest in them, No. 1, they help end gun violence a lot quicker and it’s more effective because it’s community based,” he said, referring to young people. “And on top of that, when law enforcement isn’t involved at that early stage, you get your kids out of that school-to-prison pipeline.”

March for Our Lives did this, he said, by using “every tool in the toolbox.” Not just holding protests and registering young people to vote, but bringing in artists, cultural leaders and other influencers to make political engagement appealing to a younger crowd. It’s the kind of trick that’s easier to pull off when you’re a 25-year-old jazz drummer and music obsessive than, say, Steny Hoyer.

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