David Michael Miller
I started writing this blog on Saturday morning. By the time it’s posted on Tuesday, there will have likely been another school shooting someplace in America.
According to National Public Radio, there have been 18 shootings on school grounds in the first 46 days of the year. That’s about one every two and a half days.
But the most recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida might be a turning point. That’s because the Columbine generation is coming of age. Since 12 students and a teacher were gunned down at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, schools across the nation have implemented drills to train students and staff in how to deal with active shooter situations. As a result, the specter of sudden violence and death haunts every school and every student in America.
And as these Columbine-era kids start to hit voting age, they’re saying that they’re not going to put up with the madness. Students at Stoneman Douglas have spoken out in the news media, in social media and in organized protests about the need for gun control. And students in high schools all over America have responded with support on social media and, in some cases, by walking out of their classes in protest against the lack of action to stop this. I would be surprised if that movement didn’t spread to Madison schools.
Now, a march on Washington is scheduled for March 20 and a National School Walkout is set for April 20. It has been more than a little encouraging to see high school students get so well organized so fast over such an important issue. But it makes sense. For them, this is literally about life or death.
Like most Americans who support stronger gun safety laws, I’ve become numb and almost hopeless as one mass gun killing after another rolls through its predictable cycle resulting in no change whatsoever. The simple political reason is that, while a majority of Americans favor action to control guns, they don’t vote on that issue. Meanwhile, a much smaller group of extremists and gun manufacturers do vote and do make campaign contributions on gun rights alone.
For most politicians there is hell to be paid for supporting the slightest restriction on even the most potent killing machines, while there is almost no political upside. I had all but lost hope that this deadly dynamic would ever change. But what I didn’t count on was a whole generation of kids who see the lunacy of needing to prepare for a mass shooter roaming through their schools.
What’s great about young people is that they often fail to accept the way things are. They have a way of looking at situations with fresh eyes and questioning the status quo. And if their elders can’t give them good answers, they tend to turn things upside down.
We may have a generation of voters who will not accept dead kids and dead teachers and who will not be satisfied by hollow offers of “thoughts and prayers.” A generation that won’t be fooled into thinking that the answer is in more mental health treatment, or believing that the FBI or other law enforcement agencies can possibly keep tabs on every disturbed person in a vast nation. A generation that understands that the root of the problem is the 300 million guns in America and that the answer is to reduce that number as much as we can.
It won’t happen overnight. For one thing, in order to be effective these young people have to become politically active in large numbers, something that is a heavy lift for young adults generally because they tend to be busy figuring out how to live and how to make a living. But if they don’t want their own kids to have to live in fear of being murdered in their own classrooms, that just might be motivation enough.
In my hope that a new generation will find the political will that eludes its elders, my thoughts and prayers are with these students.