American youth teach their elders

In today’s gun-crazed America, it’s getting hard to tell the kids from the adults. A week after 17 Florida high-schoolers were killed in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, the wisest calls for a constructive response were coming from young people mature beyond their years.

Vowing, “We are going to be the last shooting,” students who survived the bloody, Feb. 14 rampage at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland met with national and state politicians to demand the strictest gun controls their country has ever seen. The teens sounded like adults. They sounded like leaders.

At the same time, the supposed grown-ups in the White House, the state Capitol of Florida and in the National Rifle Association behaved like six-year-olds overdosing on M&Ms.

President Donald Trump actually came up with the ludicrous proposal to give loaded weapons to as many as one million teachers as they go about their daily work in the nation’s schools.

You couldn’t make this nonsense up. It’s like saying the cure to obesity is eating more fast food.

In fact, there was an armed guard at the Florida high school, but he failed to enter the building or stop the shooter. Not to be out-Trumped, the gun-friendly politicians at the Florida legislature slammed the door shut on any possible ban on the kind of deadly assault rifle used in Parkland.

As for the august NRA - which contributed $30 million to Trump’s election campaign - it’s spokesperson, Dana Loesch, brayed on about the “insane monster” responsible for the Parkland shooting who should not have had a gun.

She might have added guns don’t kill people, monsters do.

Compare Trump’s irrational exuberance and the other assorted, self-serving bloviations to the clearheaded pleas for effective gun control coming not only from the students who survived the shootings in Parkland but, increasingly, other young Americans. “America is a gun society,” Alfonso Calderon, a 16-year-old student from the Parkland high school, told politicians at the state legislature.

“This is what made (suspect) Nikolas Cruz seem normal. It is not normal for someone to have a stockpile of weapons in their room when they are mentally ill.” If there is any hope that America’s domestic arms race can be stopped and reversed, it’s coming from the young, from teens like Calderon.

They know that seven American children or teens are shot dead every day.

They know an estimated 150,000 school pupils in the U.S. have experienced shootings at their campus since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

They know America stands alone in the developed world for having lax gun laws and mind-numbingly horrific gun violence.

They refuse to accept present-day reality is their destiny. For them, the right to grow old matters more than the right to bear arms.

These students may not achieve the sweeping reforms they want. Especially not yet. Fortunately, they have time on their side.

Their generation may, a year, a decade, even a half-century from now, force America to come to its senses.