Students walk out for gun control. School kids march for their lives. Students want government to protect them?
Wait, what? The same government that can’t even balance a budget … let alone navigate the tightrope between liberty and tyranny? I’ll get back to the idiocy of trusting in government in a moment.
First, dear anti-gun enthusiasts:
You’ve decided that NOW is the time to make activists of school kids. You’re actually pushing the absurd notion that young people who experience school shootings are more qualified to effect the change you want than those who haven’t?
Memo to students
This is one time you should NOT listen to your elders. Here’s some better advice:
Protect yourselves by policing yourselves. More gun control cannot and will not make you more safe. Ask yourself this: Are you’re willing to put your safety in the hands of THIS government? You do realize that if you are and if you push this to its endpoint, you’ll be trading freedom for LESS security, right?
Back to trusting in government:
Do you think it wise to trust a government whose FBI failed to follow-up on multiple tips about Nikolas Cruz? Can you rely on a government that made it much more difficult for schools to punish violent students and for local law enforcement to partner with districts to remove repeat offenders?
Wait a minute. Why am I addressing students? The vast majority of them don’t know their butts from holes in the ground. I know—I was one. And I remember that I pulled many silly and senseless stunts simply because I was young and dumb.
Let’s face it—we were ALL young and dumb. We lacked wisdom and maturity because we lacked experience and life lessons—and the ability to speak effectively on issues like gun control.
In the words of savvy Mad Men Creative Director Don Draper, “Young people don’t know anything. Especially that they’re young.”
Exploitive adults
I’ll now address the real movers of this movement:
Anti-gun enthusiasts, who are using young people to further your gun-control agenda, listen up:
Qualification to speak wisely on issues and effect real solutions isn’t earned through the fear and tragedy of surviving a school shooting. It’s earned through earnest study of cause and effect and the ability to objectively process evidence and weigh the viability of potential solutions.
Most kids can’t process the causes and effects of a bad date.
The notion that these Florida students—or any high school or younger people—are qualified to speak expertly about gun control is absurd. It’s “thinking” like this that springs from the same illogic that asserts that children can responsibly decide to change their gender.
Any parent can tell you that their kid can change his opinion about virtually anything five times in five minutes. I know that school kids aren’t toddlers and that many are bright and eager to make a difference. But intelligence mixed with inexperience—and tragedy—does NOT make them more qualified to be voices for any issue.
Stop using kids
Anti-gun activists: Have you considered that the intense fear school shooting survivors experience may make them LESS qualified to speak objectively about gun control? Could your insistence that they’re freshly qualified to do so be exploitive?
Let’s talk qualifications again. Qualifications are attained through education and experience, which leads to expertise. Going through a traumatic experience doesn’t qualify anyone for anything. Yes, these school kids’ voices are important and may be more resonant than others, but more qualified?
I would listen most intently to anyone who can separate his emotions from his intellect and actually process and analyze data involving existing gun laws and mass shootings. Do you truly think traumatized school shooting survivors can do either objectively?
Would you consider that maybe we should let these kids process and heal from the tragedy they’ve endured? And instead enlist those who’ve already graduated from high school and maybe even have college degrees. And perhaps we could listen to those with real-world experience that comes with being … I don’t know … a few MORE years beyond puberty.
Let’s go ground zero
Stop using kids to bring us to our senses about the senseless need for MORE gun control. Never mind that the real need is for more parental and familial latitude to commit mentally ill young people like Nikolas Cruz who bragged about his plans to become a killer.
Do you think that cajoling students to walk out of class and march for their lives to get THIS federal government to pass more gun control legislation is a better solution than coming up with ground-zero solutions at the state and local level?
Would you rather protect the freedom of troubled kids like Cruz to skirt mental health treatment than empower parents and families to force them to get help? Do you truly think this upside down “logic” is a smart way to protect our students?
Glaring illogic
Speaking of logic, let’s summarize yours:
More gun controls laws + scattershot enforcement by a government that consistently proves itself unable or unwilling to make them work = equals safer schools.
Armed guards + schools ≠ safer school zones while posting gun-free zone signs in schools does.
Allowing teachers to arm themselves = terrible idea. Relying on local, hamstrung cops to risk life and limb and do their duty = good idea.
And now you’re pushing school walkouts and marches for gun control? I can tell you that as a young student, my friends and I would’ve walked out of school in support of any cause. We would have walked out to support anti-mosquito discrimination—as long as it got us out of class.
We’d march in a March For Our Lives … or Chives … or Hives event as long as it included girls or free pizza.
Whose movement?
Truth to adult users:
Your student gun control push is a movement only because you’ve made it one. You seem to think that government is the answer to all our problems while ignoring commonsense people-to-people solutions. And you’ll use any tools it takes to push your agenda—even kids.
The March For Our Lives events, billed as “for the kids, by the kids,” are promoted and sponsored by a collection of progressive organizations including Everytown For Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, The Women’s March On Washington, Planned Parenthood (that’s rich), and as usual, MoveOn.org.
The Florida school kids went through some real scary trauma. We owe them a clear-headed discussion and swift action to better protect them and others, not self-serving, never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste partisan activism.
As Americans, school kids’ voices are important, but their experience does NOT make them uniquely qualified as voices for gun control. To pretend that they are and to use them to further one side of the argument is opportunistic and abusive.
Let’s protect our children—not weaponize them.