There are a lot of anti-gun voices out there. The media is riddled with them and they do their best to present one side over another. What we need is Second Amendment outreach, especially as anti-gun forces try to use the Apalachee High School shooting to justify gun control.
And as an NYU student from Georgia illustrates, we need it everywhere.
You see, he penned an op-ed for a student publication at the university where he pushes gun control.
Content warning: This article contains mentions of gun violence.
I am no stranger to the countless conversations surrounding the effects and limits of gun ownership. After all, I grew up in Georgia, a place where owning a gun is common — even some of my peers carried for protection or used a gun for recreational purposes. But a gun’s ever-present capacity for irreparable harm, proven by the school shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut or Parkland, Florida, has never left the back of my mind. The danger of firearms still felt quite distant and foreign to my own experiences — until now. The recent Apalachee High School shooting that took place only a few hundred miles from my home, in which two students and two teachers were murdered, wasn’t just another headline for me; it was a wake-up call.
When a shooting happens in a place you call home, debates about gun control become personal. It makes you realize how easy it is for a shooting to occur at your high school or university.
First, can we all get a laugh at a freaking trigger warning at the top? Yes, it mentions gun violence, but if just talking about it "triggers" you, then maybe you're just too fragile to engage in political discussions as a whole.
I don't know this guy, but as someone who grew up in Georgia as well, I find this whole thing problematic.
If he lives "a few hundred miles" from Winder, Georgia, and "a few" means three or more, then I live closer to the shooting than he does. I can't imagine exactly where, because while Georgia's a decent size state, it ain't exactly Texas where you can drive all day and never leave the state, but we'll take him at his word here. What I can tell you is that most people around here don't view Winder as "home," for one thing, and while the gun debate is personal for a lot of us, it's not for the reason this writer claims.
It's because people like him are trying to take our means of defending ourselves and our nation.
The author goes on to talk about how we need gun control and what all can and has been done to advance it, but I'm going to flip the script on him, because we need to be doing all of that, too.
We can't be content with winning in court because of Bruen, Heller, and McDonald. We need to reach out and start talking about how and why the Second Amendment matters and just why gun control is a losing strategy. We need to mobilize young people to use the tools of this generation such as social media to address the claims that gun control works. We need to show how gun rights are actually a matter of protecting lives.
In short, we need to reach out and undermine the narrative, and not just in anti-gun states.
This writer is from Georgia, the same as I am, yet we have diametrically different views on the right to keep and bear arms. Somehow, some way, this writer got infected with the anti-gun mind virus. What's more, if he lives "a few hundred miles" from Winder, that means he's somewhere in South Georgia. That's my neck of the woods. With the exception of somewhere like Savannah or another larger city in the state, most places are pro-gun, so this kid got it from somewhere and we did a poor job of countering it.
We need to do better.
