Parkland: Students Up Against The Walls of Resistence

The worst school shooting since Columbine nearly two decades ago happened on Valentine's Day at a high school in Parkland, Florida.  Seventeen students and faculty were murdered because the suspect, who reportedly had a history of mental problems, apparently used an assault rifle to take out his frustrations on his former school.

Usually after something like this happens, we get the usual hand-wringing over how could this have happened and why isn't anything done about it, while the people in power insist "this isn't the time to talk about it" as they offer meaningless "thoughts and prayers".  The only ones who benefit from all this is the National Rifle Association.

What's different this time is that the students who were survivors of this event, having seen too many of these played out on television, are no longer interested in the status quo.  They are speaking out while mourning the loss of their peers.  They are organizing nationwide marches.  They are calling BS on the establishment.  They are calling BS on having to play the victim every time, raising their hands in the air as if they were prisoners about to be shot, or being held hostage during a lockdown.  Centers of learning shouldn't be centers of incarceration.

These students are following in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents who protested the Vietnam War.  Back then, they shut down universities and burned their draft cards to show their displeasure at a conflict no one really understood.  All that got them was more years of war and "four dead in Ohio".

The Parkland high school students will be facing a number of walls on the road to firearm sanity.  Not just President Donald Trump's wall, but also the wall of the NRA and its bought-off politicians who brush aside any meaningful gun reform, and the wall of public attitudes among Second Amendment zealots who believe gun control meaning they have to give up theirs so only the police and the bad guys have them.

There's also the wall of skeptics who think this wave of student activism is really a bogus plot by liberals to get more Democrats in Congress in November.  They point to how the FBI allegedly botched its surveillance on the shooting suspect.  How's gun control doing in Chicago, they say, which has the nation's highest crime rate?  Or how many abortions have been performed when compared to gun deaths.  Or why we should believe teenagers who have made Tide Pods detergent part of their diets?

The skeptics will also point to how there's been 18 mass shootings in 2018 alone.  If that's true, then how come we haven't heard about any of them?  Also, if you want armed guards and pistol-packing teachers in school, who's going to pay for them?  And how long will it be before somebody blames all this on the Russians?

We wish the students of Parkland, Florida, and all the other survivors of gun violence--whether it occurs in public or behind closed doors--the best in convincing our lawmakers to rein in those weapons and the individuals who use them to commit murder.  But Rome wasn't built in a day.  These students will be well into adulthood before the walls of skepticism and doubt come tumbling down, and their kids won't be cowering under their desks waiting for the all clear sign.