Students Who Survived the Florida Shooting Are Fed Up and Fighting for Change
American mass shootings like the one in Florida have followed the same cycle of public outrage and Congressional apathy since Sandy Hook. People beg their reps to do something, anything, to try to prevent future shootings or at the very least make them less deadly. Politicians and opponents of gun control suddenly believe that laws are impossible to enforce, and every potentially violent teenager can just as easily scour the black market for assault rifles as buy one legally, so why should we bother to make it harder for them to get an AR-15? Yes, it's tragic that people just died, they say, but a bigger tragedy would be to interfere with consumer culture and make it harder for future killers to buy weapons legally.
These examples sound extreme, but they're the positions that Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan adopted immediately after the latest school shooting. Usually, this routine where they pantomime concern gives them cover to wait out the public outcry until another shooting happens and they start over. Congress won't just change U.S. gun laws because they magically grew a conscience or a spine. They'll only do so when the political cost of doing nothing is more than they can afford, and thanks to the NRA, doing nothing has been very lucrative.
But there's a fundamental difference after the latest school shooting in Florida: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who survived are furious and speaking out. The generation currently in school has grown up in an environment where school shootings are more and more common, and while politicians are scared to "make this political," these students aren't.
"We need action," David Hogg said in a widely circulated interview on CNN. "We're children. You guys are the adults."
Many of them are even pushing back on Donald Trump's visit, telling The Daily Beast that the president blamed them for not preventing the massacre. As one student put it, "One big reason people don’t want him here was his speech yesterday and tweet of his. Apparently [the president] said it was the kids’ responsibility to report Nikolas Cruz so in a way it was our fault… A lot of people aren’t happy about his visit.”
They aren't just giving interviews and writing op-eds, either. Many were on social media sending updates while the shooting was still happening, and since then several of the students have taken to Twitter to share what they went through, and to shut down hack pundits.
This is what makes Parkland different from the aftermath of previous school shootings. The survivors are eloquent and social media-savvy, fully aware of the disingenuous hand-wringing from opponents of gun control, and they're refusing to be sidelined. They aren't alone: students at other Florida high schools staged protests and walk-outs on Friday, rallying for gun control and carrying signs that called the NRA a terrorist organization. A nationwide walk-out is already in the works for March 14. And more student-led rallies happened on Saturday:
It's high time to just turn the country over to these kids. They've already proven they're braver anyone running it now.
