On Saturday, students around the United States rallied in support of gun control measures. From Los Angeles to New York, Washington and Parkland, young Americans declared that they’re “done hiding” from violence and will “stop at nothing” to effect change.
Young adults shared their fears while survivors bared anger and grief. The most impassioned speeches, reports the New York Times, came from victims of a February mass shooting in Parkland, FL.
“If they continue to ignore us, to only pretend to listen, then we will take action where it counts,” said Delaney Tarr, a student at Marjory Stoneland High School in Parkland, which witnessed 17 deaths during a Valentine’s Day rampage. “We will take action every day in every way until they simply cannot ignore us any more.”
But Congress, it seems, has little interest in offering anything other than platitudes and fading promises.
Few concrete measures to counter gun violence have been implemented, even after President Donald Trump announced an openness to raising firearm purchasing ages and implementing a ban on certain rifle accessories.
Perhaps because of that, ‘March for Our Lives’ was strangely devoid of familiar faces – adult politicians and prominent media personalities, while present, remained off-stage as teenagers and college students spoke. Protestors carried signs bearing slogans like “Graduations, not funerals!” In Chicago, crowds chanted “Fear has no place in our schools” as they gathered and marched.
“Today, we march,” said Tarr, speaking to tens of thousands in Washington, D.C. “We fight. We roar. We prepare our signs. We raise them high. We know what we want, we know how to get it and we are not waiting any more.”
Hardly a day before the rallies were slated to take place, Congress again balked at the prospect of reform. An omnibus spending bill – touted once as an opportunity to reform immigration policy and gun control – passed without concession to proponents of either cause.
Some special interests groups and politicians issued statements condemning the rallies, writing off students and Parkland survivors like Tarr as “hypocrites” and fools.
Shortly before the marches were due to begin, NRATV host Colon Noir lashed out against some of the movement’s teenage spokespersons, saying “no one would know your names” if more men and women at Parkland had been armed.
“These kids out to be marching against their own hypocritical belief structures,” said Noir. “The only reason we’ve ever heard of them is because the guns didn’t come soon enough.”
Noir’s particular strand of cynicism was echoed by counter-protesters as well as former U.S. senator and one-time presidential contender Rick Santorum.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Santorum chided protesters for not being proactive.
“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” said Santorum.
Somehow coming across as more radical than Noir, Santorum continued, responding to the program’s hosts questions with a quick dismissal.
“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” he said. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?”
Doing that, claims Santorum, would have been more worthwhile than “protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.’”
Sources
Rick Santorum to Parkland students: Learn CPR instead of protesting for ‘phony gun laws’
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