If someone had trademarked the phrase "Those students are using their First Amendment rights to take away our Second Amendment rights" before Saturday's March for Our Lives that person would never have to work again.
That phrase or statements close to it were splattered across the KZRG Facebook comments on posts about the national rallies and the one in Joplin.
The phrase also made it to the Turner Report after a first-person account of Joplin's March for Our Lives written by Joplin High School senior Emma Simon
was posted Saturday night.
The phrase sounds clever, but as with many phrases that sound clever it has no substance and no accuracy.
While there may have been speakers who would like to see all guns eliminated and a couple of signs of that nature were cherrypicked for the photos that ran on right wing propaganda sites, for the most part no one seemed to have any problem with people keeping guns for their own protection or for hunting.
You could not tell that from some of the commenters on this site and the KZRG site.
Some attacked the teenagers for addressing gun violence, but not doing something about bullying, which has led to that type of violence in some instances.
That was a cheap shot.
The children who were in downtown Joplin Saturday are the kind who have become involved in efforts to curb bullying in their high schools. Apparently, they are not as one-dimensional as some of their critics.
Others pointed out that more people are killed by handguns in Chicago than are killed in school shootings. That has been a fixture of the Second Amendment arguments on Fox News.
Obviously, these people were not paying any attention to the speakers and interviews from Washington, D. C. High school students from Chicago, Washington, and other inner cities were included. It was not a bunch of rich "snowflakes" from Florida.
And let's get one thing straight- Anyone who uses the phrase "useful idiot" should only do so when standing in front of a mirror and addressing himself.
There were the commenters who likened the local teens to Hitler Youth and described how they have been brainwashed by the left. Most of the people who made those comments used similar phrasings and made exactly the same points, almost as if they had been brainwashed by the right. I will be charitable and grant that neither side has been brainwashed.
Many of the critics of the students admonished them for not knowing their history. They don't know the value of the Second Amendment or they don't know about how confiscation of weapons led to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Perhaps that would he an apt historical reference if these kids were actually trying to take away Second Amendment rights. Their reading of history does not indicate the Second Amendment applies to every weapon from handguns to atom bombs.
Of course, there were the critics who put down the students because it is not possible for teenagers to think intelligently about any subject, unless the students' thoughts happened to agree with theirs. If they thought in any other way, it had to be because they were being influenced by some outside group, or even worse, by those godless public school teachers.
It only makes sense that students who are interested in becoming active on an issue of importance would seek older people with more experience who would know what steps they needed to take to make their voices heard. Thus, the mentions of the Southwest Missouri Democrats and the Green Alliance in Emma Simon's post.
Instead of worrying about the deadly lessons of
Mein Kampf, perhaps the critics should have read a more enlightening and uplifting book- David Halberstam's
The Children, in which he details the efforts of the Freedom Riders, most of them college and high school age, including such people as John Lewis and Diane Nash, who braved violent attacks as they attempted to desegregate the Jim Crow south in the early '60s.
The book tells how the young people did connect with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and while they valued King's advice, they did not always follow it.
Young people can think for themselves.
Thankfully, at this point Emma Simon and the others from Joplin, Webb City, and other schools across the nation are not having to face the kind of immediate violence that the Freedom Riders faced, at least not as they make their voices heard.
The fear is that nothing will be done until more young people are killed in yet another school shooting.
Last week, a shooting took place at a Maryland high school and the shooter was taken out by an armed security officer.
One Turner Report commenter noted that the media did not cover that because it did not fit in with the story they want to get across.
That is another ridiculous statement.
The story was all over the news.
Armed security guards have become a necessity in today's schools and increasing them is certainly a step toward protecting children.
Improved access to mental health and identification of people who do not have any business having guns and making sure these people do not fall through bureaucratic loopholes is something that should also happen.
Strengthened background checks are a must.
We should study the effects of violent video games and movies.
All of those things should happen.
Any plan to address gun violence in this country, however, has to look at guns. That is common sense. The idea that if we keep adding more guns that safety will increase and we do not need to examine the types of weapons that are available and whether those weapons should be available is an open invitation to more violence.
My guess is there are many gun owners who agree that something needs to be done- not to take away their Second Amendment rights but to address a situation and weapons that our forefathers could never have anticipated.
And then there are other gun owners who will take to the comments sections of KZRG to verbally attack high school students who had the courage to take their message to the streets.
Emma Simon: March for Our Lives Comes to Joplin
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The real story of the successes and failures of the City of Joplin and the Joplin R-8 School District after the tornado- Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud.
