Nation’s youth pick up torch of mass protest

Hundreds of thousands of young people, many too young to vote, took the streets to protest gun violence.

The torch has been passed. This time it’s not the Vietnam War. Now it’s gun violence, in particular when it invades our schools.

It’s deja vu all over again as a new generation of young people make like their grandparents once did in the ’60s in raising their voices against an unpopular war.

This time their target is a nation awash in guns, a nation that they believe values the right to buy guns more than their safety.

Hundreds of thousands of young people converged on Washington, D.C., over the weekend to demand change in the nation’s gun laws in the wake of the latest mass school shooting, this one having taken the lives of 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And it wasn’t just D.C. Rallies were held across the country, hundreds gathering in towns around the region including Pottstown and West Chester.

Talk about an encore. Last week it was students across the nation holding the National School Walkout to focus attention on gun laws.

Less than a week later they were on the march. Literally.

Busloads of young people from this region joined hundreds of thousands on Pennsylvania Avenue for the March For Our Lives.

Kiera Caldwell, a junior and vice president of the student council at Strath Haven High School, was among the Delco contingent who made the trip to D.C.

Her concern was simple: She and her fellow students no longer feel safe at school. It was a sentiment heard in D.C., and right here in the Philadelphia suburbs. Sharon Hsu, a junior at Radnor High School, spoke at the Rose Tree Park event and shared the feelings of her classmates.

It was the same theme. Kids no longer feel safe in school. Their voices were heard loud and clear. But it was something else that might eventually bring about the change they desire when it comes to background checks and other controls on gun sales in the United States. That would be their votes. Millions of these kids are about to turn 18, and thus obtain the right to vote.

The kids who too often have a target on their back when it comes to this scourge of gun violence and mass school shootings are vowing to put a target on those legislators who stand in the way of change.

Much like their grandparents decades ago, these young voices likely will not be muffled. They are not going away, and they are vowing to exact change – at the polling place if that is what it takes.

“We have gathered here today to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” Hsu told the throng.

They have already changed the minds of some of their elected leaders.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more gun-friendly state than Florida.

But in the wake of the Parkland disaster, the Florida Legislature – after initially turning away similar legislation and then coming face-to-face with student protesters – passed a new package of gun control legislation.

The new Florida law raises the age limit to buy a gun from 18 to 21. It also creates a “guardian” program that enables teachers and other school employees to carry guns.

It already has sparked a lawsuit from the National Rifle Association, saying it violates Second Amendment rights.

Students also traveled to Washington, D.C., where they sat in the White House with President Trump and gave heart-rending testimony – not only to what happened in their school – but also to what can and should be done to make sure this recurring American nightmare does not occur again.

Then, Saturday, they returned to the nation’s capital in droves. Hundreds of thousands of them, all with the same message.

Enough. Never again. Only this time they had a promise to go along with their chants.

It was the promise of millions of new voters, young people who will not soon forget what happened after Columbine, and after Sandy Hook, and now after Parkland.

Most of all, they are vowing not to forget when they enter the voting booth. That might be the biggest weapon of all in this great national gun debate.

Dear legislators, your constituents just fired a warning shot across the bow. And their aim is true.