Will America Choose Its Children Over Guns?
They are asking in what kind of country are children sent off to school with bulletproof book bags strapped to their backs — capable,
one manufacturer, Bullet Blocker, says, of “stopping a .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, 9mm, .45 caliber hollow point ammunition and more.”
“I was born 13 months after Columbine,” a 12th grader named Faith Ward said on Monday, referring to
the school massacre in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, the dawn of the modern wave of school shootings.
Ms. Ward spoke to a television reporter at an anti-gun demonstration outside her school in Plantation, Fla. “This is all I have ever known,” she said, “this culture of being gunned down for no reason,
and this culture of people saying, ‘Oh, let’s send thoughts and prayers’ for three days, and then moving on.
Young people, initially reviled by establishment forces as unwashed, longhaired traitors, energized an antiwar movement
that swept the country and, even if it took years, ultimately ended America’s misguided adventure in Southeast Asia.
Such a program should also include reinstating a nationwide ban on assault weapons — a state measure died in the Florida Legislature Tuesday —
and ending an absurd prohibition against using federal public health funds to study gun violence
They’ve had enough of empty expressions of sympathy in the wake of the sort of atrocities they’ve grown
up with, like last week’s mass shooting that took 17 lives at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
A tighter federal system of background checks is a start, to better monitor would-be
gun buyers with mental illness, for example, or histories of gun violence.
