Mass shootings are now as prevalent as NFL games in the United States; even when there isn’t one happening, they’re all anyone can talk about. (Both are also responsible for horrible and easily preventable injuries and only exist to like the pockets of the already rich, but let’s not run this metaphor into the ground.) The latest one*, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was particularly gruesome; it’s pretty sobering to consider that the Columbine massacre, which has become cultural shorthand for a gun-fueled murder rampage, wouldn’t even crack the top ten now.
I don’t want to rehash the gun control debate here; I’ve already done that enough in this space, and while I will briefly touch on some of the issues that dominate it, it’s beyond tiresome to keep going over and over again. (I also don’t agree with most of my political peers on gun politics, although I am in favor of extremely robust regulation of firearms ownership.) What I want to discuss, rather, is the reaction of some of the kids who lived through the killing, and who have uncharacteristically gotten a large amount of attention because of their insistence that it might be possible for the government of the country they live in to actually do something about what happened to them.
Now, of course, the Parkland teens aren’t the first ones to speak out against gun violence. Plenty of other mass shooting survivors — which grim category must surely be growing into one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country — have advocated for gun control, and as is often the case, white kids are just beginning to catch up to work that young men and women of color have already been doing for decades. What’s unusual is that, for once, politicians, members of the press, and others who have the actual capacity to effect some kind of change are actually paying a small amount of attention.
The schoolmates of those who were senselessly gunned down by a well-armed and inexplicably furious alumnus of Stoneman Douglas have been working tirelessly to make sure their memories, unlike so many who came before them, aren’t quickly erased with a shrug from the national narrative. They haven’t gained an enormous amount of political traction, since this is still America and we are still under the thumb of any industry that has enough ready cash to hire lobbyists to do our governing for us, but they at least have refused to shut up and go mourn where the rest of us can’t see them. One salutary effect of their actions was a nationally televised town hall with their senator, the spineless cretin Marco Rubio, which resulted in his getting dragged by a bunch of kids who aren’t old enough to drive. Rubio, a shameless panderer and a complete fraud who deserves to be rolled off a boat while inside an oil drum, fancies himself a real intellectual, but the last year has seen him get completely owned by both Donald Trump and a bunch of teenagers, so that alone makes their efforts worthwhile.
However, it’s only part of what makes watching their surprising persistence so interesting. The National Rifle Association, an amoral trade organization that makes its nut off of human misery, has done its usual job of propagandizing against them the same way it does anyone who suggests that there might be something wrong with letting anyone who wants to wander around crowded places with military weaponry, and it’s worked to a certain degree. The usual narratives of Soros payoffs, liberal media coaching, and crisis actors have been deployed against the kids of Parkland, and the usual people will believe them. The Republican Party, which claims to have a moral advantage over its opposition, has had no problem directing defaming adolescents whose friends were murdered in front of them. But all this hasn’t seemed to discourage them in the least.
We hear a lot of bafflegab about the purity and innocence of the young mind, and for the most part it can be dismissed out of hand. Teenagers aren’t saints, and before we start thinking that these kids will be the drivers of the next political revolution, it’s good to remember that it was someone not much older than they are who shot up the school in the first place. The existence of proud boys and GamerGaters should be enough to make us distrustful of the notion that the teens will save us all. But what they do possess is a lack of concern for respectability. They haven’t yet got enough skin in the phony game to care whether or not the questions they’re asking will ruin it for everybody else, and so they are direct and honest in a way that we aren’t used to seeing from their much more experienced, intelligent, and informed elders whose need for acceptance into a rigged system has rendered them gutless.
What the Parkland kids have done is to ask questions that are obvious to anyone who has given these issues even a minute’s worth of thought, but which most people don’t ask out of fear — questions like “If the government can’t even begin to formulate a plan to prevent children from being massacred at school, what the fuck is it even for?”. They are not the first people to look at the undeniable connection between gun lobby payola and a complete reluctance to do anything about gun violence, but they are the only ones who can make that connection explicitly obvious without risking a lack of access. Maybe a lot of us would love to be able to take a craven, supercilious puke like Marco Rubio and humiliate him in front of millions of people by simply asking him if he’ll stop taking bribes from the firearms industry, but they’re the ones who got the opportunity, and they took it.
Look, folks, the window of discourse is expanding every second. There’s practically no garbage left in politics that’s too big to toss through it. The Florida legislature has responded to the Stoneman Douglas massacre by voting to arm teachers, an idea that combines reckless stupidity with a giant payoff to the firearms industry, and President Trump has embraced the move wholeheartedly, adding his own brand of transparently phony tough-guy talk. The murders in Parkland are probably not going to result in any kind of gun control at all, sensible or otherwise, and a child will not lead us out of the hell that capitalism and blood-lust have made for us. But at least for a moment, a bunch of them stood up and stated the obvious, and we can’t say they didn’t warn us.
*: Well, not actually the latest, but the latest one that we’re still talking about.