I taught high school students for 46 years and while many of them were smart and articulate,I can not remember a single one of them who ever watched the news unless forced to do so as part of a class assignment. They were singularly uninformed about what went on in the world beyond their music, their friends, and current movies and singularly uninterested in the world’s problems. Except for the few deer hunters among them, none of them could tell you anything about a rifle and none of them had any idea what current gun laws were.
The same is true of the Parkland Three — Cameron Kasky, Emma Gonzalez, and David Hogg — the three young students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who, following the shooting there, were co-opted by the left as the unassailable, sage voices of the anti-gun movement. Cameron, Emma, and David are indeed articulate, but they are still teenagers, high school students, no better informed and no wiser than any of the hundreds of students that passed through my classrooms.
They were not the only students who suffered trauma. They were not the only students who saw their classmates and teachers shot and survived. But theirs are the only voices that are being touted by the left and the media, because they jumped to the quick and all too easy conclusion that if Nikolas Cruz had not had a gun, he would not have killed anyone, forgetting the myriad ways that other mass murders have been carried out. And because they leapt to the “ban guns” conclusion, they became celebrities overnight, hosted on countless television programs and sent to Washington D.C. to speak at the “March for Our Lives.”
Unfortunately, the students who with perhaps more wisdom wondered why the sheriff’s deputy hadn’t entered the building to engage the shooter, or who suggested that Cruz would have found another method to kill if the gun had not been available, or who blamed the FBI, the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, and school authorities for not dealing with Cruz in any of the earlier complaints about his behavior. . . these students have been largely ignored. Their voices basically unheard while David Hogg, smug in his youthful arrogance has peppered interviews with the “F” word, and insulted every adult in the country including his own parents by saying “our parents don’t know how to use a f***ing democracy, so we have to.” Does he even know what a democracy is? Does he know that we don’t live in a democracy, but rather a republic? I doubt it.
In his 18 years, he feels he has learned so much that he now knows more than those adults who have lived and experienced and learned for 20, 30, 40, even 50 years more than he. Can he hold an opinion? Of course. But the world should not assume that his opinion, or the opinions of Cameron Kasky and Emma Gonzolas are any wiser than the opinions of the average teenager.
Whatever those three may believe, they do not know as much as they think they do. As for their sudden rise to celebrity status, it is only because they are being used by the left as poster children for assailing the Second Amendment. The arrogance of Hogg to attempt to have Laura Ingraham fired simply because she tweeted “David Hogg Rejected by Four Colleges to Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)” and the fact that many companies bowed to his call for a boycott is more than troubling. Ingraham had every right to say whatever she wished about this crass young man. Our Republic protects free speech, David, even if you don’t like what she said. And in any case, Ingraham was correct. You were whining about those colleges at an interview. A lesson for you to learn here, young man: Those who are in the limelight must accept that they will be the target of criticism. That you feel yourself above that clearly demonstrates your childish naiveté. And the suggestion by the media that your words and opinions are unassailable because you were one of the nearly three thousand students who survived the attack is ludicrous.
In addition to the almost divine wisdom that the media imparted to these students, the public was also led to believe they had enviable organizational skills, using social media to plan the nationwide school walk-outs, getting funding from Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, and organizing the trip to Washington for the “March for Our Lives.” But, it seems that in the end, these supposed genius organizers were after all. . . just teenagers.
According to BuzzFeed, Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz aided in the lobbying in Tallahassee to get funding from the legislature, a teacher’s union organized the buses that got the kids to Washington, Michael Bloomberg’s groups and the Women’s March organized the “March for Our Lives,” MoveOn.org did the media promotion and actual march logistics, and training for the student activists was provided by federally funded Planned Parenthood. The president of the American Federation of Teachers told BuzzFeed that they organized the national school walkout, “which journalists had previously assured the public was the sole work of a teenager” (The Federalist). And, of course, only about 10% of the people at the “March for Our Lives” were actually teenagers. Most of the rest were participants from the Women’s March, many still wearing their pink hats.
It is beyond time for the real adults in the room to admit to the actual causes of the shooting in Parkland. Hint: It wasn’t the gun. Nikolas Cruz was a murderer in the making who should have been recognized and dealt with by law enforcement on both the local and federal level long before Valentine’s Day. Those who lived with him, who went to school with him, who suffered his violent outbursts knew what he was capable of and they did what American citizens are told to do: They saw something and they said something. Tragically, no one listened.