The students in Tucson and throughout the country who will walk out of class Wednesday in a call for common-sense gun control are taking a stand many adults have given up on.
They — and their cause — deserve our wholehearted support.
At schools across the country, students plan to leave their classrooms at 10 a.m., gather together and hold 17 minutes of silence to symbolize the 17 victims of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
We stand with them.
We ask, when students lock themselves in their classrooms, hide under their desks or step inside a closet during an “active- shooter drill,” what do you think we are teaching them? What does a child’s fear in school say about our values?
As they step up and fight back — as they try to teach us that the normalization of mass shootings is abhorrent — we should listen.
The Parkland shooting has galvanized people in a way that others —including Sandy Hook Elementary, where first-graders were slaughtered in their classroom in Connecticut — have failed to do.
When Congress refused to pass common-sense changes, including universal background checks for all gun purchases, after Sandy Hook, many adults lost hope. If the slaughter of 6-year-olds did not break the NRA’s stranglehold in Congress, what must happen for the momentum to change?
Parkland happened. Teachers and students were gunned down by a 19-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle. Almost from the beginning, the young women and men of Marjory Stoneman High School let the world know that their pain would not be in vain.
They gathered to protest, they did interviews for radio, TV and print; they used social media to shame politicians who have grown skilled in the art of deflection.
They are making change happen.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott last week signed Florida’s first gun-control measure in more than 20 years.
The bipartisan legislation prohibits gun sales to people under 21, institutes a three-day waiting period on gun sales, allows police to bar a person deemed dangerous by a court from owning guns for up to a year and bans bump stocks (which where used in the mass slaughter at the 2017 Las Vegas shooting).
The NRA has already sued to stop the age increase.
Arizona student leaders have said they advocate the following:
• Requiring universal background checks on buyers.
- Prohibiting people charged with domestic violence from having weapons.
- Allowing a judge to issue a “mental-health injunction” to remove firearms from people found to pose “a significant danger of personal injury to himself or another.”
Jordan Harb, a high school junior in Phoenix, brought up a change that Arizona Republican lawmakers who insist the problem is mental health, not guns, should immediately get behind:
Hire more school counselors.
Pro-gun lawmakers may try to dismiss the walkout as the work of students or overwrought teenagers —but they should remember that, before too long, these energized and outraged students will be voters.
