A WALKOUT FOR CHANGE
Students rally across U.S. to fight for gun law reform: ‘We want to be the generation that changes everything’
CLEARWATER, FLA.— They walked out steady on their feet and calm. They didn’t have their hands over their heads. They weren’t crying.
Which is how the world has seen too many American students led away from their schools by law enforcement over the past couple of decades: petrified, sobbing, assuming the position of the unarmed, Pied Pipered to safety by cops wearing tactical vests. And, for the lucky ones, into the loving embrace of parents.
With the roster of the dead intoned and a hand-rung bell solemnly tolling at Clearwater High School, it felt a bit like annual 9/11 commemorations.
Except these wounds are self-inflicted. No foreign monsters flying hijacked planes into the Twin Towers. The monsters live among them, attend their schools.
Across the U.S. on Wednesday — National School Walkout Day — tens of thousands of students from some 3,000 schools staged their own remembrance events to honour the dead, exactly one month after the shooting massacre at Marjory Stone- man Douglas, in Parkland, Fla.
They held assembles, in some places they marched and chanted “WE WANT CHANGE!” They held up placards proclaiming: “NEVER AGAIN” and “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” and “WE DESERVE BETTER” and “I AM A BULLET-FREE ZONE.”
Most school principals stood back and permitted the demonstrations. Some forbade their students from participating, even when the kids came armed with permission slips from their parents.
Others barred the media from their property. Many colleges have declared that high school students disciplined for protesting will not have that counted against them when they apply for admission. Those forced to stay in class tweeted out their frustration: “Hawthorn High School has locked us in and blocked all exits not allowing us to participate in the walkout, but we wish to be out there with everyone”; “They had us do a fire drill at 10 when we were gonna walk out”; “It was either stay in my seat and not walk out, or get in trouble and possibly suspended. #nationalwalkout I’m sorry, I stayed.”
Even this, peaceful tributes for the slain, has had a polarizing impact on the nation. Though not as much as the pro-gun lobby would have you believe. A recent Quinnipiac University National Poll found that 66 per cent of Americans support stricter gun laws, the highest ever measured. Why? Because of Sandy Hook. Because of the Las Vegas carnage last year. Because of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016. But mostly because three of America’s deadliest mass shooting in the past decade — Virginia Tech in 2007, Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 and Parkland on Valentine’s Day — have occurred in schools.
And also because half of the country’s 265 million guns — the legally obtained firearms — are owned by just 3 per cent of the population.
That’s the gun-lobby tail wagging the dog. In a nation where, as per the Centers for Disease Control, seven Americans age 19 and younger are killed by a gun on an average day — the U.S. having the highest rate of murder or manslaughter by firearms in the developed world. It is America’s plague. They won’t swallow the antidote. Gun laws stick in the craw of politicians who take the NRA’s donations and quake in their shoes.
At Clearwater High, hundreds of students gathered in the bleachers along the football field. In this particular show of solidarity, not a word was spoken about gun violence in the formal part of the event, although there was discussion at an earlier assembly closed to the media.
“Politics aside today,” one teenage girl said. “This is about remembering the victims.”
But then she added: “We want to be the generation that changes everything.”
God love them, for believing that. For having faith that the adults who are supposed to protect them — kids in their classrooms, learning, walking through school hallways — will take all the prudent steps that an infestation of school shootings demands. Nobody, or at least only the very few radical dreamers, is talking about repealing the Second Amendment that enshrines the right to bear arms.
This, however, is surely not what the founding fathers intended — students, even young first graders, massacred in their schools, in nearly every instance by an emotionally disturbed and red-mist angry teenager. The Second Amendment, in brief, was meant to raise and arm civilian militias, to take arms against an oppressive state if necessary.
Does U.S. President Donald Trump, the moron-in-chief, even know that? A couple of weeks ago, after the mayhem at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, he was in favour of some weapon restrictions, crucially raising the legal age for buying a firearm to 21. Then he wasn’t. And surely it can’t be because the NRA twisted his neck. Trump, the urbanite from New York, is not beholden to the NRA. Though of course his Republican party is. Although even the Republican-majority Florida state legislature last week passed a bill that at least symbolically kicked the NRA in the teeth: legal age of possession to purchase a rifle or shotgun raised to 21 from 18; expanding the three-day background check waiting list from handguns to all firearms; banning the use of modifying bump stocks that can turn a semiautomatic into a fast-firing automatic. Teachers will not be armed to stop an active shooter — as Trump has promoted — but janitors, librarians, coaches, guidance counsellors, principals, could be.
Most infuriatingly to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas families, and the students who’ve so effectively been taking their die-in protests to the state capitol in Tallahassee — there is no ban on assault weapons, like the AR-15 rifle legally purchased by former student Nikolas Cruz, formally arraigned in a Broward County courtroom Wednesday, charged with murdering 17 and wounding another 17. The 19-year-old, who has confessed to being the shooter, stood mute rather than enter a plea. The presiding judge entered a not-guilty plea for him.
They’re not old enough to vote, most of these students who protested Wednesday, or held 17 minutes of silence for the 14 students and three faculty murdered a month ago, or six minutes of silence for the amount of time it took for the shooters to do all that carnage.
Yet they’ve been hard to ignore, especially the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas who’ve made their sorrow and rage public, who’ve even gone to Washington in recent weeks. Hundreds of students from the D.C. stood across from the White House Wednesday and symbolically turned their backs on 1600 Pennsylvania Blvd., as, they rightfully argue, the White House has turned their back on them. Trump was not home. Maybe this is a tipping point, after all. Maybe sanity will finally prevail. But probably not.
But it was youth that turned a country against the Vietnam War a half century ago.
And there was an echo of that groundswell movement in one of the chants that rang across the country Wednesday: “HEY HEY NRA, HOW MANY KIDS HAVE YOU KILLED TODAY!”