Activism comes in many forms, and many of them require engaging with lawmakers. Lobbying, for example, means you have to end up face to face with the decision-makers or, at the very least, their staff. Sometimes it’s useful to protest outside of a legislator’s office, too.
However, there has to be a balance. The idea is to sway the lawmaker, not to bludgeon them.
That’s something the folks at March For Our Lives haven’t gotten the memo on just yet.
March For Our Lives protesters staged a demonstration in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office on Wednesday to demand stricter gun legislation.
In footage and photos of the demonstration posted by the gun control advocacy group on social media, students could be seen delivering remarks urging for gun reform and holding up coloring books they brought to explain the trauma they go “through as students in America,” the group said.
In one clip the group tweeted out on Thursday morning, the group writes: “We went to @senatemajldr Mitch McConnell’s office to call out his childish behavior, and demand that he do his job to save lives. His staff told us to stop filming, we filmed anyways.”
They’re ones to talk about “childish behavior.” After all, they just threw a temper tantrum in McConnell’s office.
The truth is, stunts like this make great headlines in a friendly media and look good for fundraising, but accomplish little else in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, these kids–and at my age, even if they’re legal adults, they’re still kids to me regardless of their politics–want to be taken seriously, yet this is part of their effort:
The brief clip starts off by showing the group of demonstrators walking down a hallway to McConnell’s Senate office. It later cuts to a clip of one student, Gracie Lee, 18, explaining art she created and brought to the senator’s office titled, “This is America.”
“I created some coloring book pages, which are depictions of all the places where shootings continually happen in our country, along with a blank page, with a box a crayons for the senator to color in the places that are inevitably going to be struck by tragedy because the senator has not taken any action,” she could be seen saying in the office.
Because when you want to be taken seriously, nothing signals maturity like a coloring book.
Seriously?
At the end of the day, all they accomplished is to annoy Sen. McConnell and his staff. They didn’t show up to debate ideas, they showed up to try and bully the Senate majority leader into doing their bidding. If McConnell isn’t going to bow to the pressure of the national news media, why would he boy to some kids with coloring books?
Honestly, it’s getting more and more impossible to take these people seriously.
Especially since they’re pathologically incapable of understanding that anyone could possibly disagree with the premise that gun control would have any impact on violence of any type.
