The students’ actions force us to contemplate the flaws in our culture that continue to allow school atrocities

Students all over Colorado and across the nation Wednesday turned to peaceful protest to send a clear message to adults. They don’t feel safe in their own schools, and they’re past tired of it.

They were right to stand up and demand better, and adults would be so terribly wrong not to listen.

The walkouts and 17-minute silent vigil to show respect for those students and teachers shot to death in Parkland, Fla., last month force us to contemplate the flaws in our culture that continue to allow such atrocities.

At schools, at work, in our theaters, restaurants, clubs and stores, at concerts and even in church, we live in ever-present danger.

Since a pair of troubled students took arms against their own at Columbine High School almost 19 years ago, it’s difficult to argue we’ve made any real progress.

Day in and day out, month after month and year after year, we just keep asking our children to prepare for a future we’ve failed to make safe for them.

They must endure active-shooter drills meant to protect them should the worst occur. They must live through the agony of actual lock-down, as credible reports of shooters outside scramble any hope of a day’s education.

Yet all too often, as in fatal shootings in Platte Canyon and Arapahoe high schools, they must face actual violence anyway.

Our children watch our incessant finger-pointing and wonder who can they trust? Which side of the gun-control debate really has their best interest at heart, or is it some incomprehensible mix of ideas we can’t seem to get to?

Certainly school systems have improved many aspects of their safety preparedness plans. Better use of well-trained and armed school resource officers provides real, on-the-ground reassurance, but as we saw in Parkland, even that system is flawed. And while we don’t support the measure, some schools are even arming teachers.

What to do? We get it that even reasonable gun-control laws that we support, such as those passed here in 2013, are only so effective. We get it that even if you could ban the kinds of semiautomatic weapons capable of firing dozens of high-velocity rounds in seconds, so many already exist as to make them ubiquitous.

What’s truly needed is culture change, and that’s what makes Wednesday’s demonstrations so important. The next generation announced it is sick to death of the status quo.

We owe it to our kids to truly start the hard work of setting aside even our most deeply held beliefs and biases and urge personal reflection and serious study of what’s causing so much gun violence.

Why shouldn’t federal lawmakers, say, fund research of the gunviolance plague at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? What message does it send our young scholars that our lawmakers can’t trust the scientific method teachers are asking them to learn?

Consider the enormous culture change that had to occur to finally stare down widespread cigarette addiction, or even the work it took to gain broad acceptance of seatbelts.

It’s time for such a worthwhile mission focused on guns.

Many Americans rightly cherish their Second Amendment rights. But something is happening in our culture that enables far too many to exploit those rights and make their promises of self-protection a bloody mockery.

Our children want us to figure it out, and that ought to be enough. The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.