DNC Uses Shooting Survivor To Encourage Voter Turnout In Midterms

Survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida are still in the media spotlight and receiving support for their gun control agenda from progressive groups, and it looks like that support is going to continue. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is now using a survivor of the shooting and her push for gun control to get registered Democrats to head to the polls during the 2018 midterms.

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In a USA Today article published Friday afternoon, Nicole Gaudiano reports that the DNC sent out an email to voters from one of the shooting victims, who turned 18 the day after the massacre and immediately registered to vote.

The article states:

A student who survived the Valentine’s Day mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., shared her story via email with supporters of the Democratic National Committee as part of the party’s drive to register new voters.

“I turned 18 the day after the shooting, and I immediately registered to vote,” wrote Sara Imam, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student. “But many of my fellow survivors can’t vote yet, and we are counting on you to stand up for young people at the ballot box.”

Imam calls on DNC supporters to commit to vote this fall as part of the party’s “IWillVote” campaign, which aims to organize and get 50 million voters to the polls, because “Voting is the first step toward ending gun violence.”

While Florida’s #NeverAgain students have become vocal proponents of gun control, Imam’s engagement with the DNC marks perhaps a new political turn, even as other outside national groups have worked to encourage youth voter registration and support students planning the March 24 “March for Our Lives” protests in Washington and dozens of other cities.

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As some of these students delve deeper into the political world, they are going to face more and more criticism, criticism that the left says is unwarranted. But these students are starting to become significant political actors, and if the DNC is going to use these young adults to further an agenda anathema to conservatism and the Constitution, it will have to expect pushback.

The young woman is now a legal adult and is, without question, eligible to vote. Without Sara Imam’s permission, this DNC email would not be going out, and while this email is something from Imam herself, one can’t help but be disappointed in the fact that the DNC is capitalizing on the tragedy to generate enthusiasm and hopefully increase voter turn out.

Maybe one’s view of these students engaging in activism would be different if they had more than one solution to stopping the problem of gun violence. During a bipartisan discussion with President Trump on how to solve this issue, Republicans around the table offered various bipartisan solutions that did not involve outright banning semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines. The focus was on securing the schools, dealing with mental health, and making background checks more thorough.

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The topic of gun violence should be a bipartisan discussion, but it is far from it.

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