It wasn't that long ago when student walkouts calling for gun control were seemingly held in every school in America. While student walkouts have long been held and are considered matters of free speech, the fact that those walkouts seemed to enjoy teacher support was a bit of a problem. It suggested this wasn't as student-led as it was presented.

But it was a one-time thing and so we all moved on.

It was an annoyance, especially because a lot of those kids really weren't there because they deeply believed in gun control. They just deeply believed in getting out of class.

Yet it seems that a Brooklyn Middle School has a tradition of student walkouts over so-called gun violence.

Students from the Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School will participate in the school's annual "Walkout to End Gun Violence", which will include a march and rally from the school's Dean Street location to Restoration Plaza, officials said.

The annual walkout—held the week of National Gun Violence Awareness Day — will be on June 5, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

...

Each spring, the 7th-grade curriculum at the charter school incorporates a learning program focused on the issue of gun violence and what actions can students take to address it, officials said.

This is an annual thing that happens each spring?

This doesn't sound like a student protest so much as teachers using students as political props.

Oh, I'm sure some of these kids are genuinely interested in stopping violence. Far too many of them may well have witnessed violence or have lost someone to violent crime for them to be ambivalent to the issue.

But if this is an annual thing, that means it's scheduled. It's planned, and anyone who has worked with, well, anything probably knows that it's hard to keep something like that going year after year without some kind of stabilizing force to make sure it happens. There's a reason the same people are typically involved in annual events year after year.

Middle school is only three years of a child's life. They move on soon enough, and while there are some things where the torch can be passed from one group to another, the reality is that in most of those cases, it's a teacher or adviser prompting much of that.

And that's what makes me sick about this.

This is likely to be a case of adults using children to push a political narrative--and we all know that "addressing gun violence" is usually the mask they put on their calls for gun control. They're using kids to try and justify disarming you and me, all while any problems with violence in Brooklyn come not from lawfully owned firearms in the first place.

And the kicker here is that they're doing this within the context of their jobs, which means people's tax dollars are going to fund anti-gun activism.

Teachers, of course, are free to take any political position they want...as individuals. They can say they're a teacher, obviously, but there comes a point where they're crossing the line. That's when they allow their politics to infest their professional life, particularly when interacting with children.

Being part of organizing an annual walkout that ultimately demands a restriction of our rights most certainly qualifies in my book.