American youth are rewriting the gun control debate

If there’s any hope of ending America’s self-destructive love-affair with guns, it’s coming from America’s youth. It’s coming from children such as 12-year-old Joseph Soriano, who was a first-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut when a gunman killed 26 people there six years ago.

It’s coming from teens such as Emma Gonzalez, who crouched in terror for six minutes and 20 seconds last month when 17 students and staff were massacred by a shooter at her high school in Parkland, Florida.

And, yes, it’s coming from the hundreds of thousands of other teens and preteens who joined Soriano and Gonzalez in the March For Our Lives demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and across the United States last weekend to demand tough, meaningful gun control.

They’re telling the world they want to learn without having to risk being shot. They know they’re struggling uphill against powerful headwinds. But they’re up for it.

The National Rifle Association — which contributed $30 million to elect Donald Trump — still pulls the strings for too many political puppets, Democrat as well as Republican.

The Second Amendment, which 227 years ago gave Americans the right to bear arms, is still too entrenched even if it no longer has a thing to do with its original purpose — public defence.

Guns are so much a part of American culture that merely questioning the right to own one can be considered as unpatriotic as burning the flag.

But changes in America’s notoriously lax gun laws are likely on the way because a new generation is on the way, too.

It took just five weeks for the students who survived the shooting spree at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland to organize a nationwide protest. They were, of course, joined by parents and grandparents, many of whom have previously called in vain for changes, such as a ban on assault rifles.

But the latest campaign for gun control is first and foremost the creation of young Americans who are disgusted that people their age are regularly being slaughtered in school classrooms and hallways.

They know about the rampages in Parkland, Sandy Hook and Columbine.

Some have seen friends die. For others, fear casts a lingering shadow over each school day. An event as routine as a school fire drill brings the gnawing doubt, however fleeting, that something awful is happening.

Don’t bet against these young people getting their way.

They’ve already turned a mass catastrophe into a mass movement.

Young Americans were instrumental in the civil rights movements that changed American attitudes to race a half century ago. Young Americans were the core of the anti-war movement that dragged the U.S. out of the Vietnam War.

Many of the kids who marched on the weekend are years away from being able to vote.

But they’ve become politically engaged. They know democracy is about numbers and that they have the numbers to make a difference.

They know, too, that while adults have the power today, it is the young who have the time it will take to win.

We salute them.

But they’ve become politically engaged. They know democracy is about numbers and that they have the numbers to make a difference.