Anti-gun Parkland Students are Advocates, Not Arbiters
Americans, generally, consider the death of one innocent a tragedy, so the concurrent deaths of multiple innocents inevitably receive national attention and create opportunities for exploitation.
No one denies the young Parkland, Florida, high school shooting survivors their legitimate trauma or grief, but anti-Second Amendment activists and national media have arbitrarily assigned “unassailable moral authority” solely to anti-gun students and, in effect, are bullying critics to “shut up!” — “Criticizing children! Indecent! Unacceptable!”
But, bromides like “Enough is enough,” and “Changing the world” are meaningless.
Parkland’s young anti-gun messengers have made themselves public advocates, but their uncertain, wrong-in-nearly-every-detail “logic” faces compelling moral self-defense arguments and legally-binding constitutional certainty.
Ideological advocates are fair game at any age, but, in this case, harsh criticism is warranted, because Parkland’s child activists’ treatment of legal, law-abiding gun owners has been vicious. The Parkland children who have sought or allowed themselves to be the new faces of decades-long anti-Second Amendment activism are poisoning public discourse.
In a town hall event, Parkland student David Hogg claimed that the National Rifle Association and its members, none of whom were involved, “want to keep killing our children.” Without making a rational case against policies he imagines permit school shootings, Hogg accused innocent Americans of killing children and harboring intentions to kill more.
Hogg’s foul, soulless blood libel irresponsibly dismisses due process and constitutional law. To young Hogg’s credit, though, he’s discovered the means by which an otherwise-ordinary, inconsequential kid can opportunistically score face time from and symbiosis with American media eager to exploit children to advance an anti-constitutional left-wing policy objective.
Another media-featured Parkland survivor, Emma Gonzalez, admitted, on video, that she was among students who ostracized and bullied the shooter. Non-introspective Emma is now living out her fifteen minutes of fame by blaming guns and the NRA.
But dissenting Parkland survivors aren’t receiving national media attention. One, Kyle Kashuv, observed that “The AR-15 … is used less times per year to kill people than hammers and fists…” Disregarded, Kyle’s factual observation doesn’t fit national media’s lurid narrative. Nor does the more-recent Maryland incident in which an armed officer stopped a school shooter.
Statistically — at least in areas outside dangerous, often gun-controlled, Democrat-run cities — gun violence has declined dramatically for thirty years even as the number of legal firearms doubled, gun laws were relaxed, and public respect for the Second Amendment grew. In the same time frame, school shootings, already extremely rare, have declined.
One is too many, of course, but children are less likely to die in school shootings today than Americans, generally, are from domestic terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, the left opposes more-stringent immigrant vetting and restricting admissions from terror-prone nations. Ironic, huh?
Parkland’s child demagogues will eventually grow up and discover that the world is not as simple or well-ordered as anyone would like. And they will learn that fickle left-wing media will abandon them when their usefulness has expired or supporting them becomes embarrassing: See: Fluke, Sandra; Sheehan, Cindy; Maines, Natalie; Clinton, Hillary.
