The media loves David Hogg and Emma Gonzales and the rest of the Parkland student anti-gun activists. They have been all over every cable news channel. There was a Town Hall on CNN where they could kick off a Two Minute Hour hate against the NRA and GOP. Hogg was on Real Time with Bill Maher. You can’t escape them blaming the NRA in front of whatever camera happens to be near by.
They are even going to lecture at Harvard, because after Harvard rescinded their lectureship to Chelsea Manning, they needed some other politically popular and fully unqualified lecturers to restore their Leftist credibility – and reminding the rational world why a Harvard degree has become nothing but a bullshit degree that shows your parents had a lot of money.
They have been backed by a number of Left wing groups to have a national student walkout on Tuesday.
However, there are some kids from Philadelphia who won’t be going.
Milan Sullivan is horrified that 17 people died in a mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school. And she does not disagree with the teenage survivors who have stood up since the massacre, demanding action on gun violence.
But she’s not leaving class next week for the National School Walkout, and she won’t board a bus for Washington for the March for Our Lives on March 24. Sullivan, a junior at Mastery Charter School-Shoemaker, is all for activism, but she is like a lot of her classmates: hesitating a little over this particular movement.
Why? Is she some sort of child hating NRA member? What good person grovel at the feet of the exalted media superstar Parkland victims?
For some students, it’s because they feel too removed from things that go on in suburban high schools in far-away places, or they feel numb to gun violence. Others wonder: Where was the attention during the protests over issues pressing our community, whether it be Black Lives Matter or the murder of a friend or relative?
“Politicians are going out of their way to help these kids,” Tatiana Amaya said of the Parkland activist students. “And there’s just a disconnect — when something happens in the white community, the black community is expected to support them, but people don’t stand up for the black community. The focus isn’t ‘What can we do to make black and brown kids feel safe in school?’ ”
Like Conservatives have been saying saying for years, anti-gun activists don’t give a shit about dead black kids in America’s urban centers because it doesn’t make for good optics.
A mass shooting at a middle/upper middle class school is the kind of thing activists can get people to rally around. When 314, mostly poor and black, kids get killed over drugs and gang violence, that’s not the kind of thing that rich, white Liberals can really muster a whole lot energy over.
Amaya, Sullivan, and the other members of Raised Woke, a Mastery-Shoemaker club focused on social justice and youth engagement, wonder where the outrage is when people in predominantly black neighborhoods get shot.
Not with the Liberal anti-gun activists for sure.
They’re not alone. From Florida to Chicago, some people in marginalized communities have been asking the same question in the wake of the Parkland massacre.
“When something happens in the black community, we don’t get a lot of support,” Sullivan, 17, said.
It’s easy to understand. An indignant Aryan Ubermensch white young man from a good school is the kind of victim that gets white Liberals in their Volvos and Lexuses to open their wallets and demand the banning of assault weapons.
Black kids from subsidized housing shot down by a gang member with a stolen handgun isn’t good for fundraising.
Or, as Kaiyah Taylor put it: “We have a lot of dying in our community, and no one is paying attention.”
(Her brother’s friend was recently gunned down on her block, Taylor said, and there was no media coverage, no story about what the victim was like, no uprising to demand answers.)
Next time, get shot by a white cop. There is a lot of white Liberal Woke outrage over that.
No one disputes that the mass slaughter in a matter of minutes by a teen toting an assault weapon rekindles what has been a bitterly fought and politically divisive national debate in the last two decades. But for this group of Mastery-Shoemaker students, a collection of dynamic, bright high school juniors, the issue is complicated, and a lot of it is about race.
What would have happened if the mass shooting happened in Philadelphia, not suburban Parkland? the students asked during a recent wide-ranging conversation. Would the outrage have been as sharp? As national? They couldn’t imagine any celebrities coming to survivors’ aid with cash and acclaim.
You’re just the wrong kind of black for celebrities to care about personally. Next time, be born in Africa so you can get adopted like a rescue dog to the fawning accolades of the tabloid media.
Why do black shooters tend to be portrayed as thugs and white shooters quickly labeled as mentally ill? the teens wanted to know.
If you really want to know, that’s because in places like Chicago the overwhelming majority of shootings are both Black on Black and gang related. In East St. Louis and New Orleans it’s also mostly gang and drug violence.
On the other hand, mass shooters tend to be either mentally unstable or ideologically driven terrorists.
There is a difference.
Around the Mastery-Shoemaker conference room where the students gathered, everyone nodded. Then the talk turned to President Trump’s call to arm teachers as a way to ward off school shooters. Kyra Lewis is OK with arming “certain people — like security guards, or the deans.”
But most students shared Perla Espinal’s view.
“School is a safe place — we don’t want guns in school,” said Espinal, 16.
“That’s promoting gun violence,” said Amaya. “It shouldn’t be that you have to have guns to feel safe.”
The schools maybe failing to teach the kids to read and do math, but they sure did learn the Democrat talking points.
Darin Toliver, a social worker and member of the Mayor’s Commission on African American Males, understands the teens’ complicated feelings.
“It’s like the opioid crisis vs. the crack dilemma,” Toliver said. “Today, we’re talking about safe injection sites, but when blacks were being infected by the crack epidemic, no one seemed to care.”
Actually Republicans did. It fell under an escalation of the War on Drugs and “tough on crime” legislation. Democrats shot it down for being “racist.”
But this is a “pivotal moment in our history,” said Toliver. “The individuals who were slaughtered on Valentine’s Day, it was more than just white kids in a suburban high school being killed. It transcends color lines. It’s a climactic period where enough is enough.”
That is actually pretty frighting, because none of what is being proposed will reduce Black on Black gang killings either. Most of these places from Philly, to Baltimore, to Chicago already have some sort of gun control and they don’t work.
Rather than focusing on a ban of assault weapons or other, less-germane-to-them issues, the group has come up with its own, Philadelphia-centered list of demands. Among them is divestment from school police officers, more mental and emotional health services, more guidance counselors and social workers, and “gun control that does not result in targeted policing of black and brown bodies.”
So close. Not focusing on an AWB is good. Throwing police out of schools is dumb. Being anti-cop is actually being pro-crime, despite what the Democrats say. Really, this looks like a “give us more money” drive.
In the end, these kids have figured out something important, anti-gun activists are opportunistic racists who don’t actually want to reduce gun violence in neighborhoods that see a lot of it. They just want the right kind of victims to wave in front of the cameras to push the same gun and magazine bans they’ve always wanted and don’t work.
The sad part is, even though these kids figure that out, they still haven’t gone off the Liberal reservation to come up with useful solutions to fixing these problems.
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