Bill Murray compares Parkland, Florida, student advocates to VietnamWar protesters
Bill Murray is having a flashback to the 1960s.
In a recent op- ed for NBC, the comedian compared the Parkland, Florida, students, who became warriors for stricter guncontrol laws after a shooting left 17 dead at their high school last month, to student advocates of a former decade.
“I was thinking, looking at the kids in Parkland, Florida, who have started these anti- gun protests, that it really was the students that began the end of the VietnamWar,” Murray wrote. “It was the students who made all the news, and that noise started, and then the movement wouldn’t stop.”
Despite the serious nature of his plea, Murray wasn’t afraid to get a little cheeky. People thought the world would end if the United States didn’t win the Vietnam War, but that wasn’t the case, he argued. “And we all survived: they survived, we survived,” Murray wrote. “People will survive. If you can just stop shooting at them, they really do pretty well.”
Murray hasn’t been outwardly political throughout his career, but comments he’s made in the past have prompted some to believe he leans right. He bashed Dems in February, telling CNBC, “I just think the way Democrats handle things is poor.” In 2014, Forbes published an article questioning if he was a “closeted Republican.” But his praise for the sanguine views of the Parkland advocates favors the views of the left.
“The thing that’s so powerful about students is that, when you haven’t had your idealism broken yet, you’re able to speak from a place that has no confusion, where there is a clear set of values,” he wrote. “But there are idealists left over the age of 18, I’m sure of it.”
The comedian didn’t push a specific action for changing the United States’ relationship with guns but rather approached the issue from a place of, well, idealism. “It’s the right idea for a human to live in peace, and a peaceful nature is a proper thing,” he wrote. “For children to be concerned about going to school, worried about what could happen to themat school, that makes for a horrible moment.”