Just as we saw in the wake of Parkland, students held a walkout to protest current gun laws. This time, it was in Iowa and in the wake of the shooting in Perry.
Yet, like with most anti-gun efforts, those protesting rarely understand the issue they’re trying to protest for.
This isn’t because they’re young–yes, these are kids, but this phenomenon isn’t unique to them by any stretch–it’s that they simply don’t understand the topic because they’ve been lied to.
And there’s ample evidence of that.
Leaders of March For Our Lives Iowa led a crowd of about 300 students, activists, lawmakers and supporters in chants of “no more silence, end gun violence” and “enough is enough” that echoed through the Iowa Capitol rotunda Monday afternoon.
Akshara Eswar, a co-executive director of the group, said Gov. Kim Reynolds has not done anything to lessen gun violence in the wake of previous school shootings at Des Moines’ East High School and the Starts Right Here alternative school.
“Tomorrow, Gov. Reynolds will give her Condition of the State speech in this Capitol where she will not do anything to help us and our fellow students around the state,” she said. “At what point do we say enough is enough? We cannot allow more people, more children, to lose their lives because of our legislators’ inaction. Their silence is deadly.”
Eswar said gun violence has become normalized, but she should not have to be scared of going to school.
I agree, students shouldn’t have to be scared of going to school. In fact, I’d argue that they don’t need to be scared of going to school.
Keep in mind that while they cite two shootings, those didn’t exactly happen last week. The East High School shooting was in March, 2022 and the Starts Right Here shooting was in January, 2023.
Further, both of those shootings appear to be gang related, rather than some random person deciding to shoot up their high school.
In other words, there’s ample reason to believe that if you banned the lawful ownership of guns right here and now, across the board, these shootings still would have happened.
But most street-level activists–which includes students taking part in a walkout because they believe in the cause, as opposed to those who walkout just to skip class and not get in trouble–don’t realize this. They think guns are bought in stores, in part because that’s where they’d buy them. They figure if you ban something then people can’t get it.
Criminals, however, don’t think that way. They get guns however they can, which means you wouldn’t have prevented those two shootings no matter what you did.
Among the photographs of the walkout at one paper’s website is a picture of a girl holding up a QR code. The code reportedly leads people to a petition where they can call for the banning of assault weapons. Again, many people seem to think that a mass shooting equals assault weapons. Yet the Perry killer used a handgun and a pump-action shotgun.
Neither of those would be banned under an assault weapon ban.
Yet again, these young activists seem blissfully unaware of these facts.
Then again, maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Maybe my issue is that I want to assume they’re capable of reasoning out things to recognize that an assault weapon ban won’t stop a killer using a pump-action shotgun.
Those taking part in this walkout and other anti-gun protests rarely understand the issue nearly as well as they like to think they do. It’s not an age thing, it’s an indoctrination thing, with only one side being presented in the media.
But it’s also not like the media is going to question them, now is it?
