The Day

NRA host criticizes teens who survived Parkland shooting.

- By CLEVE R. WOOTSON JR.

As they’ve stepped out of the hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and into the national spotlight, the Parkland, Fla., teenagers have become Twitter influencer­s, TV news show mainstays and the stoic-faced subjects of a Time magazine cover.

But they’ve also increasing­ly become targets: Their most prominent critics are people who see them less as survivors of a tragedy and more as pawns in a larger effort to influence gun policy.

The latest attack came from Colion Noir, a host on NRA TV who took to the airwaves on the eve of the Parkland teens-led March on Washington, telling them: “No one would know your names” if a student gunman hadn’t stormed into their school and killed three staff members and 14 students.

“To all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment at your march on Saturday, I wish a hero like Blaine Gaskill had been at Marjory Douglas High School last month because your classmates would still be alive and no one would know your names, because the media would have completely and utterly ignored your story, the way they ignored his,” Noir said.

Colion Noir is a pseudonym for Collins Iyare Idehen Jr., a lawyer and gun rights activist from Houston who has nearly 650,000 subscriber­s on YouTube. The man he references, St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Deputy Blaine Gaskill, is the 34-year-old SWAT-trained officer who engaged a teenager who opened fire at Great Mills High School in southern Maryland. Noir and others have said Gaskill’s interventi­on illustrate­s that the solution to school gun violence is more “good guys with guns.”

Noir did not return messages from The Washington Post seeking comment.

Noir is the latest of a growing number of people who’ve criticized the teens. An aide to a Florida legislator was fired after he called the school shooting survivors crisis actors who travel from tragic place to tragic place making impassione­d but bogus political pleas to take away gun rights. Donald Trump Jr. liked a tweet saying one of the most vocal students had been coached by his FBI-agent father to peddle “anti-Trump rhetoric and anti-gun legislatio­n.”

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