I was told that the Parkland school kids protesting against
guns were supportive of measures that have a broad appeal and then asked why I
felt compelled to speak out against them. I was told about David Hogg “He doesn’t strike me as particularly radical, yet he seems to
trigger many conservatives, for some reason.” I was also told that by saying
anything about them it made those of us who disagree with them makes me “look
like snowflakes” we accuse others of being. And then I was told that “They are
TEENS”, as if that provides them blanket protection from being opposed or
questioned.
Here’s the thing. If you choose to take
center stage you place yourself on a pedestal from which you can be knocked
off. If you go on national TV and blame a group like the NRA for the deaths at
Parkland, an organization who had nothing to do with it, then you should be
questioned. If you insult anyone different than you by saying "When
your old-a** parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re
just like, ‘Give me the f*cking phone and let me handle it.’ Sadly, that’s what
we have to do with our government; our parents don’t know how to use a f*cking
democracy, so we have to" you’ve displayed the fact that you think far too
much of yourself and don’t understand the way democracy works.
If you say “…the more stress and work I put on me, the more stress
and work I can deal with" and then whine when someone talks about you not being
able to get into the college you want by calling on advertisers to boycott that
person’s show you’ve shown that you don’t deal well with the stress and feel
that anyone who has a differing opinion should be silenced by your actions. If
you say about a sitting Senator "What about the $176,000 you took for
those 17 people’s blood?" you’ve changed your attack once more from the
person who did the shooting to someone not involved and an organization (NRA)
that had nothing to do with the shooting or shooter and thus has no blood on
their hands; it’s political posturing and nothing more.
When safety issues are put in place for YOUR protection and
you complain about them, things like clear back packs, and you complain that "Many
students want their privacy” and then say "It’s unnecessary, it’s
embarrassing for a lot of the students and it makes them feel isolated and
separated from the rest of American school culture where they’re having essentially
their First Amendment rights infringed upon because they can’t freely wear
whatever backpack they want regardless of what it is" while ignoring the
fact that your goal is to infringe on the Second Amendment right of others, you
show you are a tool.
When you demand safer schools and then say now your school
is "like a prison" since the shooting last month, with "hundreds
of police officers" patrolling the campus and follow that up with "When
you have all these new police officers and resource officers coming into
schools, what I'm worried is going to happen is we're going to increase the
school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color
and lower social status," and follow that with "What happens is
politicians like Gov. Rick Scott are lobbied by the private prison industry,
that are private prisons paid for by the government essentially to keep these
people in. That's not how we're going to fix this situation" you’re
showing you’re more of an activist than dismayed teen.
In using someone involved in a catastrophe of any kind to be
your spokesman you put them into something long used by the left and described
as the doctrine of infallibility. What this means is the person being used as a
spokesperson cannot be questioned or their opinions discussed because to do so
automatically results in your being called heartless, unsympathetic to their
situation or unopen to dialogue…as you are shut down from speaking. Notice how
we shouldn’t be saying anything about them because “They’re TEENS” or because
they were traumatized by what happened to them.
I wondered about this traumatization. In the days following
the shooting we were told how traumatized they were. Raw footage of a major
media group (I think CNN but I’m not sure) coaching Hogg in what to say and
allowed to repeat answers was released but explained away that it wasn’t
coaching, that he was nervous about being on camera and upset about what had happened.
At the same time we were provided footage shot inside the school in a closet
done by David Hogg where he calmly questioned fellow students about what was
going on and they discussed their thoughts on gun control. No one seemed upset.
Later we were told that once he was released and home, he grabbed his camera
and rode back to the school on his bike in order to shoot footage of what was
transpiring there. Am I the only one who doesn’t think that sounds like someone
traumatized?
Here’s another question to ponder. With the exception of one
person, none of those who have come out at the marches and spoken on TV
repeatedly were confronted by the shooter. Where are those who were shot and
survived? Why are they not getting attention? Why aren’t we hearing from them?
And why are those who disagree with Hogg and his fellow activists provided the
same amount of media coverage? Or are they “just teens” who no one should
bother to listen to? But the reality is that maybe, just maybe, they actually were traumatized. They were the real victims both that day and now that they're being forced to relive it over and over again because of fellow students who are basking in the spotlight.
One would think that these vocal gun opponents represented
the majority of those teens at their school. Except that that isn’t the case.
One teacher came forward and said that “I’ve had some students approach me
privately to talk to me about it, but I should note that those student
activists none of them were ever in any danger during this whole thing…none of
them except for the one girl Samantha Fuentes.” She went on “But I have
students in my class that were shot, but you don’t see them. They have the most
personal experience of anyone except for that one girl.” She also said “There
have been a lot of my students that have spoken to me about it privately, and
they’ve told me word for word as well as paraphrasing that these kids don’t
speak for all students.” And here’s one last thing, something that no one in
the media is considering or talking about that she said: “Every single day
since we’ve come back to school, I have kids out in the hall crying because of
the emotional toll that it’s taken, and we haven’t started to heal yet, because
we’re in the news every single day, and every single day there are helicopters
circling overhead.” So the kids in the school are actually traumatized and reminded
on a daily basis of what occurred as much because of their fellow students grabbing that spotlight as they were by the events that took place.
What about other protests? On Friday, March 30th, students staged a walkout
at Rockledge High School in Florida. Where were the cameras? Where was the big
pocket money folks who paid for the march in D.C.? Where were the adult
organizers who planned out the entire event from the loudspeakers to the stages
to the press coverage to organizing celebrities to setting up hotel accommodations
and the rest? Or did you think “just teens” set all of that up? That it was
actually “just teens” that were able to pull all of that off even though most
aren’t old enough to rent a car. Another group of teens planned a staged
walkout in California in support of anti-abortion activists. How much attention
did that garner?
Through it all there are several facts that are completely
ignored. The homicide rate in the US has dropped drastically since the 1970s as
this graph using FBI statistics shows.
Research by James Alan Fox at Northeastern University shows
there is not a growing trend in school shootings. His research states:
“Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
“Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
“Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.”
Fox also stated that the activists demand to outlaw certain
guns would have little to no effect saying “The thing to remember is that these
are extremely rare events, and no matter what you can come up with to prevent
it, the shooter will have a workaround,” adding that over the past 35 years,
there have been only five cases in which someone ages 18 to 20 used an assault
rifle in a mass shooting.
A February 22 article in NEW YORK MAGAZINE said:
“Schools in the United States are safer today than at any time in recent
memory. Criminal victimization in America’s education facilities has declined
in tandem with the nation’s collapsing crime rate. Meanwhile, as of 2013, the
year after the Newtown massacre, mass shootings accounted for only 1.5 percent
of all gun deaths in the United States, or 502 total fatalities.”
Leah Libresco at the Washington Post, a
newspaper that tends to lean far left, after doing research said:
“I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths...
“By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them.”
There is also the fact that while gun ownership has dramatically
increased gun homicides have rapidly fallen. Consider this graph that shows the
factual difference between the two.
So why do people talk about David Hogg and the other teens
who are supposedly just speaking their mind about gun control? Perhaps it’s
because the things they are saying aren’t based on facts but on political
sloganeering. Perhaps it’s because most of us have enough common sense to
realize that it isn’t just a group of grass root teens who suddenly know how to
do all the things needed to stage an organized march in D.C. Perhaps it's because it's all about activism and not about real concepts that could help. Instead maybe
these teens are being used as pawns by someone else with a different agenda.
Someone who knows that by saying anything against these teens they can portray
you as being insensitive to their traumatized personas, at least the traumatization
they portray. Just because you’re a teen does not provide you free reign to
call others name, to insult people, to attempt to destroy a person’s career or
to silence those who disagree with you. If you step onto the public stage know
that there are some who will call you out.
No one is speaking out against common sense solutions to the
problem of gun violence or disagreeing with those who ask for it. But those
aren’t the issues that we hear anyone talking about. Speaking out against the
NRA and gun owners gets better and more press coverage. You may make a comment
somewhere about mental health issues but that’s not spotlight material and you
know it. And if you choose to take center stage know that it makes you open to disagreement or to be called out on your claims. So feel free to focus more on creating slogans, raising your fist and chanting. It
will allow you your 15 minutes of fame and when it’s all said and done you won’t
be fanning the flames of revolution but just be another spark in the pages of
history that died out once the controversy ended and the cameras stopped rolling.
