Five Lies About the Student ‘Walkout’ for Gun Control
Joel Pollak writes:
Thousands of students “walked out” of classrooms at schools across the country on Wednesday to protest for new gun control legislation in the wake of last month’s mass shooting at Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
The mainstream media are celebrating the “walkout” as an authentic expression of outrage that demands a response from political leaders. But it is not, and there are at least five lies they are telling you about it. (Mr. Weekes, the chief assistant public defender, said the lawyers were still trying to piece together the details of Mr. Nikolas Cruz’s life. Mr. Cruz has a “significant” history of mental illness, according to Mr. Weekes, and is possibly autistic or has a learning disability.) The walkout was about “gun control” not addressing mental illness.
Lie #1: The “walkout” is being staged by students.
School walkout (Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty)
In most schools, especially elementary schools, the walkout is being organized by teachers, administrators, and liberal parents. Nationwide, the walkout is being coordinated by the Women’s March, an anti-Trump organization that has a soft spot for radical antisemites like Louis Farrakhan. Big media companies, especially CNN, have been publicizing the protest.
Students are involved, but not in charge.
Lie #2: The “walkout” is voluntary.
Elementary school walkout in Alexandria, Virginia. More than 65 kids, and they are totally silent. Look at those faces. pic.twitter.com/ThyzDtyGo5
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) March 14, 2018
Younger children cannot stay in classrooms by themselves, and they cannot opt out. Older children in some schools are reportedly allowed to stay behind, but many will be less likely to do so given pressure from adults and peers.
Somehow, the liberals who argue against prayer in public schools — even a generic “moment of silence” — because of fears of religious coercion are creating a coercive political environment.
Lie #3: The “walkout” is not about gun control.
Organizers are pulling a sly bait-and-switch. At my daughter’s school, for example, staff and the PTA organized a “peace and kindness assembly.” The principal told parents, via e-mail: “There will be NO mention of school shootings, guns, or violence of any kind.” But the PTA said: “Schools across the country and state are supporting their students as they show their support for greater gun control.”
They minimize objections by selling “peace” to parents, then maximize impact by pushing “gun control” in the media.
Lie #4: The “walkout” is non-partisan
(Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty)
The groups involved in organizing the walkout are all left-wing and Democrat-aligned.
Few, if any, schools are bothering to provide an alternative point of view about the importance of the Second Amendment, or about arming qualified teachers and staff to intercept and deter possible attackers.
Lie #5: If you oppose the “walkout,” you support violence against children.
This is the most pernicious lie of all, and real message of the protests. The goal of the “walkout” — aside from mobilizing Democrats against gun-clinging Republicans in a midterm election year — is to shame Second Amendment supporters into silence and conformity.
It amounts to exploiting our children, as well as those 17 deaths in Florida, for political purposes.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News.
There are no depths to which these agenda-mongers will not sink to promote their full-court-press to destroy the unique culture of this nation.
I’m in my 60s. Kids used to bring their deer rifles to school in their cars and park them on the lot because some of them went hunting in the morning before school. And this was in the suburbs very near a city, not some rural farming community.
We all had firearms at home whether we were hunters, in the shooting sports or just “because”. There were none of these school shootings. There was bullying. There were cliques which excluded others and denigrated them. All of the various social pathologies upon which the agenda-mongers would like to heap blame for these incidents were profligate when we had no mass shootings in schools.
What was just beginning in those days was “mainstreaming” of students who were not normally considered to be under the umbrella of what was called public education. I’m talking about people who were more suited for mental healthcare facilities.
There was no hue&cry for ending this when one such “mainstreamed” psycho-killer did what might have been expected at McCluer North HS in St. Louis Co. Christine Smetzer’s corpse was so brutalized that her own teachers initially could’t recognize her when another student found her remains in the girl’s restroom.
http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/141880409/
The psycho-killer had been attending McCluer HS. His bizarre behavior was becoming pretty obvious. When school officials called his parents in and suggested they seek help for their son because his problems were beyond those with which the school was capable of coping they declined to seek such help. The school knew this would eventually mean trouble so they invoked a “don’t-ask/don’t-tell” transfer for him to their sister school McCluer North. The rest is history.
There was a law passed or the school policies were amended. Maybe both ( I don’t remember ) but there was no law or policy change to exclude those whose parents are informed their children are dangerous but who decline to take responsible action.
That’s’ not “mental health”. That’s responsible parenting.
In times when it was considered “political suicide” to advocate restrictions on acquiring/possessing firearms we had a social moré of feeling shame over having “crazy” offspring in a family. There was a stigma and it might be more difficult for the siblings of such offspring to find mates. So families tended to take measures to see to it that the Michael Taylors of the world were not put right out on “front street” for everyone’s admiration. That was long before the Hinkley Doctrine ( so-called “tough love” ) became popular and which nearly killed a President.
The well-to-do might have sought an involuntary commitment to an institution. Others less well-off may have confined the offspring themselves. The point is there were social pressures that militated against such people being at-large and having access to all the useful and dangerous things normal people expect to have available to them. And back then there were some mighty dangerous things readily available. Paris Green was an arsenic compound people used to sprinkle around the margins of their floors to kill pests. People regularly purchased things that would have Homeland Security tearing out their hair. But there was a certain standard of responsibility being maintained about whether people who cannot be trusted with dangerous things would be allowed to be at-large. Now the implied right for the mentally-ill to fight one-another for the warmest steam-grate upon-which to spend the night is considered more “moral” and “constitutional” than an *explicit* individual right whose very trespass is “posted” in the 2nd Amendment.
It’s not about mental health so much as it is about personal responsibility for the creation of dysfunctional offspring. People see these traits emerging in their kids and the next thing you know they’re interviewing everyone in the community about how they’d feel about the interviewer if she put her whack-o son in an institution ( that was Adam Lanza’s mother–she even consulted the HVAC contractor about it—-why didin’t she just put him in the institution and quit worrying about what everyone in the community would think of her if s he did?).
We’re all so worried what people will think of us if we take “strong measures” now that we’re afraid to do almost everything–except to create maladjusted whack-job offspring. That right, of course, is sacrosanct.
Because if it weren’t then how could we have all these outrageous incidents which the agenda-mongers shamelessly exploit to effect cultural change which has 0 to-do with creating a safer/saner environment. The same week that a loon-bat wearing no pants mounted an armed attack on a franchise “Greasy Spoon” eatery more people were slain by another such loon in Canada using nothing more than a motor vehicle. But no student protests against indivdual ownership of motor-vehicles ensued…
These “protests” are nothing to do with making this a safer society. They’re about making this just one more nation with nothing to distinguish it from any other. And from there it’s far easier to ask the question “what does it matter if you live in a sovereign nation?” and get no challenging answers back.
And that’s what this is really about—global cultural homogenization.