The student survivors — not the politicians, and certainly not the president — stirred the nation after last week’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida took 17 lives in the latest of America’s senseless mass shootings.
The words of students like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg are a call to action: The nation’s leaders must find the will to enact meaningful gun control legislation to stem the carnage.
Gonzalez, an 18-year-old senior at the high school in Parkland, told a gun control rally in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday, “Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead, we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the founding fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.”
She concluded: “Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent that, we call BS. They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.”
Hogg, a 17-year-old senior, was among those who recorded video during the terror-filled minutes when 17 classmates, teachers and coaches were slain by a man with an AR-15 rifle, the same semi-automatic weapon used in other mass shootings. “Imagine hearing bullets … it’s absolutely awful,” Hogg said. “This is why people need to be politically active. This needs to be a turning point.”
On Sunday, Hogg spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in response to President Donald Trump’s weekend tweets criticizing Democrats for failing to approve gun control measures when they controlled Congress, and the FBI for ignoring tips that accused shooter Nikolas Cruz was dangerous. “You’re the president. You’re supposed to bring this nation together, not divide us,” Hogg said. “How dare you?”
Trump failed to mention gun control in his address to the nation Thursday, the day after the shooting in Florida, instead saying officials needed to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” The president spent most of the holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his private estate in Palm Beach, some 40 miles away from last week’s deadly violence.
On Monday, students participated in a “lie-in” in front of the White House to symbolize the dead and call for stronger gun controls. Inside, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying Trump supports “efforts to improve the federal background check system” used to compile an FBI database of people banned from buying guns.
But teenagers like Gonzalez, Hogg and others who used rallies, social media and national television as their platforms and #NeverAgain as their hashtag want much more than that. They organized March For Our Lives, which is planning anti-gun violence demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere on March 24.
“March For Our Lives is created by, inspired by, and led by students across the country who will no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings that has become all too familiar. In the tragic wake of the seventeen lives brutally cut short in Florida, politicians are telling us that now is not the time to talk about guns. March For Our Lives believes the time is now,” declares its mission statement.
“The mission and focus of March For Our Lives is to demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues. No special interest group, no political agenda is more critical than timely passage of legislation to effectively address the gun violence issues that are rampant in our country.”
How many more school shootings will it take before politicians act?