Today, millions of students across America demonstrated their frustration with Washington gridlock and efforts to bolster national gun-control laws by marching out of class in an inspiring display of conviction and defiance.
Yeah…except not really. This morning, a marginal number of students did actually march out of their classrooms in the name of gun control following the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But this “passionate display of conviction” was not a genuine moment of fierce outrage over our slow-moving politics that has, thus far, failed to take any substantive action in curtailing gun violence. It was kids being kids: that is, taking advantage of a situation to cut class.
Don’t expect that hard truth to make it anywhere in the media’s swooning coverage of the walkout, however. Check out the favorable coverage on NBC:
“These are student organized events,” says reporter Ron Allen, gushing over images of kids spilling out of school like a stinkbomb just went off in the chemistry lab.
The Political Insider’s fact-checker was consulted on Allen’s claim that these walkouts have been solely organized by students and the verdict just came through: false.
It turns out that everyone’s favorite Islamo-fascist-loving group, the Women’s March, was behind organizing the walkout, going as far as to issue a list of demands, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with domestic gun control.
Robert Tracinski rips apart the nonsensical demands in series of devastating tweets:
So a) the Louis Farrakhan fangirls at the Women’s March are the ones behind the “National School Walkout” today. Great leadership there, and I’m glad we all got the message about not tolerating bigots. And….
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) March 14, 2018
b) Here are there legislative demands. See if you can spot a big, glaring inconsistency here.https://t.co/XJ4RVhpMJP pic.twitter.com/ZxB1pwwQcY
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) March 14, 2018
They also say, “We demand Congress recognize all forms of gun violence, including violence committed by police.” So who will be enforcing the gun bans, then?
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) March 14, 2018
Who, indeed, will confiscate all of our “dangerous” guns if not the police? Logic is never a high school student’s strong suit, and it looks like the gals of the Women’s March aren’t much better at using Aristotle’s laws of thought.
Here’s another interesting tidbit from the Women’s March walkout website: “We also recognize the United States has exported gun violence through imperialist foreign policy to destabilize other nations. We raise our voices for action against all these forms of gun violence.”
If you thought today’s walkout was simply about gun control, how wrong you were. To paraphrase a classic line from “Mean Girls,” stop trying to make gun violence intersectionality happen.
Just to demonstrate how small of an impact the whole display had, below is a copy of an email sent to parents of students at Fairfax High School in Virginia, a fairly liberal and prosperous area.
While 250 may seem like a sizable number of students, it represents less than 10% of the 2,622 students enrolled. Not exactly on par with the kind of Vietnam War walkouts the nation saw in Lyndon Johnson’s day.
To be sure, public protests are an American tradition that date back to the Boston Tea Party. These students have every right to air their grievances in the form of non-violent protests just as their forebears did for all sorts of causes, including the abolition of slavery, the right of women and minorities to vote, and to extricate America from costly wars.
Nobody wants to prohibit students from exercising their constitutional right to free speech. But, at some point, these protests need to have a concrete set of demands that aren’t contradictory, and aren’t supported by outside political groups looking to take advantage of authentic activism for their own goals.
What do you think of today’s student walkout? Is it real, or a sham? Tell us your thoughts below!
