With the events at Michigan State University recently, it’s no surprise that there are a lot of anti-gun protests taking place all over the place. Gun control advocates are having rallies and marches like there’s no tomorrow.

In fairness, they have to recognize that if they don’t seize the initiative, there’s no hope of enacting their preferred policies.

After all, once people settle down a bit and quit letting their emotions decide things, they come to recognize that gun control not only doesn’t work but is a terrible idea across the board.

Yet it seems many gun control advocates don’t get that.

College students, activists, and public officials gathered near Boston Common Friday to call for tougher gun laws nationally as they honored victims of the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University.

Holding signs that said “Students Demand Action,” the roughly two-dozen protesters stood in cold sunshine on a sidewalk on the State House side of the Common.

CJ Hoekenga, a survivor of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, delivered an emotional call to action.

“Our voices matter and it’s time to make them heard. By many, we have been coined the ‘school shooting generation.’ This was an identity that was forced upon us by the world that we were born into,” said Hoekenga, now an Emerson College student. “Despite this, this is not the world we have to live in. We may be the school shooting generation, but let’s also be the generation that tackles the issue of gun violence. . . . The time is now and the change is us.”

Of course their voices matter. In a free society, all voices matter and deserve to be heard. It’s how we know where people stand.

The problem is that people like Hoekenga don’t think that. When they say that “our voices matter,” what they mean is, “our voices are the only ones that matter.”

They don’t want anyone listing to people like us, people who can look at what happened in Michigan State and recognize how the system itself broke down. They don’t want anyone to hear us point out how the shooter had been facing felony charges prior to the shooting but prosecutors reduced it to a misdemeanor.

At no point is it a discussion these anti-gun voices want. What they want is domination. They want us to sit down, shut up, and take what they want to dish out like good little slaves.

I’m sorry. I don’t play that way.

Gun control is a losing proposition. Further, it ignores the underlying problems going on in this country–problems largely unidentified–that lead to things like mass shootings. It ignores the fact that our “knife homicide” is higher than many other industrialized nations’ total homicide rates.

The anti-gunners don’t want to face that reality.

Their voices matter, sure, but so do ours. If we’re supposed to listen to what they’re dishing out, then they need to sit down, shut up, and listen to us for a change as well.

We know what they want and why. We couldn’t hide from it if we wanted to. Their anti-gun ideas permeate and infect pretty much every aspect of our lives.

Their voices matter, but so do ours.