Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Students Held A Press Conference This Afternoon And It Was Unbelievably Frustrating

I listened to this on my drive home just a bit ago.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students held a press conference at the state capitol.  It was extraordinarily frustrating for many reasons. First, my heart breaks for these kids. Lorenzo Prado, who was mistaken for the shooter by the SWAT team for awhile – his account of the events of last Wednesday were excruciating to listen to.

These kids absolutely deserve to be heard. They deserve to express themselves in the way they are. The walkouts across the country, ostensibly meant to show respect for the 17 lives lost, are not inappropriate. Their pain shouldn’t be ignored.

But so much of what these kids said in this press conference was inaccurate, misguided, not grounded in reality, and flat wrong. They are lashing out against the NRA, which is the VERY ORGANIZATION by the way, which has pushed for more consistency and accuracy and depth of criminal background databases. They are demanding “common sense gun reform” from their legislators, without having the first clue what that means, and more importantly, what it DOESN’T mean. They are demanding “action” without having any sense of how utterly meaningless a bump stock law or a ban on AR15s would be, not to mention how completely unconstitutional.

There’s part of me that wants Trump to just pass a bunch of ridiculous gun laws – whatever laws the Democrats are insisting will be the end-all, be-all solution, to PROVE once and for all that those laws won’t change JACK SQUAT. But there’s the other part of me that is furious Trump is giving even an inch on the bump stock thing, because it’s conceding a point that should not be conceded.

YES – absolutely let’s strengthen the criminal background databases. Let’s make it so that if police have been called to a house 35+ times that there’s a record of it that can be accessed by a gun seller. Let’s make the FBI and local police officials more connected when it comes to sharing information. If there’s legislation that can do those things – PASS IT.

But this isn’t a gun problem, as much as these students insist it is. This isn’t an NRA problem. No amount of legislation on guns or anything else will change the culture that’s driving people to these acts of terror.

We have a serious culture problem. It’s caused by a desensitization to violence (and I’m looking at you, disgusting video games and Tarantino movies). It’s caused by a lack of parenting, lack of faith, lack of Actual Human Relationships in favor of social media likes and follows. It’s caused by a failed education system more interested in telling our kids about toxic masculinity and gender pronouns than it is civics and western civilization. It’s caused by leftists fighting tooth and nail for taxpayer funded murder of unborn babies, instead of fighting for the sanctity of human life. Individuals no longer matter to leftists, because they’re far too busy categorizing everyone into groups of victims. And if individual life no longer matters, then it’s a whole lot easier for evil people to commit acts of murder.

These kids are in pain, and they deserve to be heard. But their pain isn’t a reason to ignore the reason we have a 2nd amendment. One of the kids insisted that the 2nd amendment is “outdated” and that since we have the strongest military in the world, we don’t need a “well-regulated militia.”

Sigh. The ignorance. Holy crap.

But what can we expect? These kids probably know every letter of the LGBTQIAPPY2KXZ#$@1UG acronym by heart, because that’s what they’re told is important these days. The Founders of our country? They were just old white dudes who aren’t cool anymore.  That whole constitution thing?  OMG SO OUTDATED, you guys.

This all just makes me so sad on so many levels.