In terms of publicity, the Parkland students have brought considerable attention to the gun issue, but in terms of substantive policy, they got clear backpacks and long TSA-like security lines. They hardly got a single gun confiscated in America (there are still 300 million firearms in the nation) and the Second Amendment is no closer to being repealed than it was before. In fact, they now simply face added nuisance (in the article, some female students pointed out that clear backpacks were potentially embarrassing in revealing feminine hygiene items or whatnot.)
It’s hard to see this as a “policy win” for them. They got significant coverage, but the policies that were enacted were of only tiny (mostly symbolic) effect and in fact just made their lives more troublesome. A Columbine or Virginia Tech spree remains every bit as possible at any high school in America, tomorrow, as it was the day before the Parkland shooting. A would-be killer still has just about as much access to guns as before.
They were probably going to get those security measures imposed on their school anyway whether they protested or not, as have many other American students in the wake of, or in a period of heightened concern about, a school shooting.
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They hardly got a single gun confiscated in America (there are still 300 million firearms in the nation) and the Second Amendment is no closer to being repealed than it was before.
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It’s early days yet. The shooting happened less than two months ago, and the student activists (or at least some of them) seem pretty committed to a long-term movement for more effective gun control. AFAICT their current focus is largely on turning out youth voters for midterm elections.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
In fact, they now simply face added nuisance (in the article, some female students pointed out that clear backpacks were potentially embarrassing in revealing feminine hygiene items or whatnot.)
It’s hard to see this as a “policy win” for them. They got significant coverage, but the policies that were enacted were of only tiny (mostly symbolic) effect and in fact just made their lives more troublesome.
[/QUOTE]
Like I said, I think you’re mistaken in suggesting that the new security policies enacted by the school were the result of the students’ national-level activism. Parkland was pretty much guaranteed to respond to the tragedy with some kind of heightened security theater no matter what the students did or didn’t do.
Shrewd response. After all, it’s well known that nothing de-energizes a youth movement, especially one originating in the senseless violent deaths of young people, like cynical sneering at its motives and belittling the reality of its concerns. That’s why Nixon calling campus protestors “bums” had such a calming effect in the aftermath of the Kent State massacre nearly 50 years ago.
You keep right on telling these teenage massacre survivors and their audiences that they’re just a bunch of attention-seeking strivers maneuvering for their own personal advantage, and that’ll straighten them out. Besides winning lots of admiration and respect for you personally.
Of course they didn’t get what they wanted. What they wanted was for their friends and classmates to not get killed. It’s too easy to lapse into thinking that this whole thing is just a ploy for attention, but if you’d ask any one of them if they’d trade that attention for getting their friends back, every one of them would say yes.
I think the OP is wrong in his claim that “the Second Amendment is no closer to being repealed than it was before.”
Unfortunately I think the OP is right in saying there will be more Columbines and Virginia Techs and Parklands. And Sandy Hooks. Hundreds more children will be shot before we finally summon the will to change our country’s insane gun laws.
Dead friends, and a frustrating waste of time trying to persuade prejudiced old men (who are deathly afraid of some other old men because the other old men are not afraid to lie to protect their toys, and raise tons of money to bribe the first old men to not snitch on them) to actually get off their asses and do something about why their friends are dead?
I’m sure it isn’t. You might as well say the Civil Rights Movement was a failure because there was no federal legislation within two months of the 1952 Mississippi gas station boycotts.
I’d say getting so many thousands of people to march in favor of gun regulation and an op-ed in the NYT proposing repealing the 2nd Amendment, by a former Supreme Court judge, is quite a bit so far.
I would say the NRA is at minimum back on its heels.
I find it appallingly disingenuous to either say “welp, they failed 'cause it’s been two whole months” or, as DavidwithaR does, to blatantly misstate their goals.
What they have been trying to do is to move their country in the direction of more reasonable gun control legislation. Considering it’s only been two months, a lot of progress has been made.
Absolutely the first thing you would have to do to change the gun control situation in the United States is break the power of the NRA. The Parkland kids have done a really good job of making the NRA and its spokespeople look like shitheads in the eyes of a lot of folks who did not previously think they were shitheads. They have started a pretty serious conversation about targeting politicians in the NRA back pocket and getting them voted out. They have rather dramatically exposed that NRA mouthpieces can be shamed down in the court of public opinion and advertising dollars. Far, far more has been done since Parkland than in the wake of the Sandy Hook horror, and after Sandy Hook a lot of people quite understandable figured the United States would be awash in guns forever.
This isn’t going to prevent any mass shootings in 2018 and probably not in 2028, but if you’re seventeen years old you’re in it for the long haul, aren’t you?
There are, indeed, some people on the left who are literally calling for gun confiscation. Every time you see someone post that we need the same gun laws that Australia and Japan has, that’s what they are saying. I wish they’d stop saying this. I don’t agree with them at all. I think their rhetoric just gives validation to the worst of the PRO-gun talking points. But nonetheless they are free to put forth their position, as are all of us.
However, I don’t believe this is reflective of the overall aims of this youth movement that has arisen to call for gun control. For one, I don’t think they have one monolithic singular goal; and insomuch as they do have one, I think it revolves mostly around the restriction of “assault weapons”.
Now, as to that point, I am not sure that bans of these weapons will be enacted. I don’t really think the political capital exists for it, and I think a lot of liberals who don’t know about guns (the ones who say “you don’t need an AR-15 to hunt deer”) don’t really understand just how many of these rifles are out there and how popular they are. Just about every military veteran that I know, among my peer group (25 to 35 years old), has one of these rifles and likes shooting them (and some people do, in fact, hunt with them.) There have been attempts to ban or restrict them in the past, at the federal level, and they never really seemed to accomplish much.
But if these people can get some measures passed like improving the background check system, improving the methods that are used to flag potentially-dangerous people, possibly increasing the age from 18 to 21 for certain weapons, yeah I think it could make a difference.