March For Our…Politics

RALEIGH – The March for Our Lives protests took place in Washington, D.C. and across the country on Saturday, allegedly organized by kids in honor of the Parkland school shooting victims. In actuality, the marches were nothing more than a manifestation of long lived political forces hell bent on eliminating Second Amendment rights and ushering in a long wish list of Radical Leftist fantasies.

In Raleigh, the pubescent pawns in this Leftist political narrative followed all the scripted talking points, oblivious to the facts that disprove it around every corner.

“”We are the future, and we can be the change we want to see in the world,” 15-year-old Lauren Smith told the crowd gathered near the North Carolina legislative building, after a march through downtown.

“To all our legislators, remember we will be voting soon,” Smith said. “And that will be evident in the next election.”

One of those legislators took the stage later, telling the crowd that “your loudest voice is your vote.”

Rep. Cynthia Ball, a Democrat who represents parts of northern Wake County in the N.C. General Assembly, said she hopes her fellow politicians see the large crowds at the rallies and are convinced to pass laws strengthening gun control rules.

“Your energy gives me hope we’ve finally reached a tipping point,” Ball said.

Earlier this month, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper outlined a number of gun control reforms he wants North Carolina to make. Many of them are changes that Democratic legislators already suggested in recent years, to no avail in the Republican-led legislature.
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One of the thousands of marchers in Raleigh Saturday was Will Arrington, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. He said that while he’s a consistent Democratic voter, he never goes to rallies or marches.

But he volunteers at Culbreth Middle School in Chapel Hill, working with kids who are immigrants or refugees. And he’s angry that many of their families came here to escape violence, but the children can’t be sure they won’t get shot at school in America either.

Then he heard the suggestions to scare off potential school shooters by arming teachers.

“This was it for me,” Arrington said. “I was like, ‘Kids are getting killed in schools and the solution is to put more guns in schools? No.””

First, does anyone really believe that these marchers weren’t already reaching for the Democratic lever in the voting booth?

Second, the amount of misleading information absorbed and regurgitated by the marchers is nauseating, if not predictable.

Kids are not getting killed in schools at an accelerated rate. Actually, the rate at which people are being killed with guns, let alone kids being killed in schools, has actually been tracking down for decades.

These facts are outlined, of all places, in the Washington Post by Harvard instructor David Ropeik:

“...the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.

The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume, especially in the glare of heart-wrenching news coverage after an event like Parkland. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports.”

So what’s changed that now a whole generation of students report feeling afraid in school every day? The media. More specifically, the Leftist media that want you to buy into an anti-gun narrative and are pimping kids like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez out to advance their cause.

“…Rare events with high emotional valence often get coverage disproportionate to their likelihood, further magnifying our fears. As a result of what the cognitive sciences call “the awareness heuristic” — a mental shortcut we use to quickly assess the likely frequency of things we don’t know much about — the more readily an event leaps to mind from our memory, or the more persistently it’s in the news, the more emotionally powerful and probable it feels. School shootings and the debate about gun control are prime examples. A threat feels more threatening if it’s getting a lot of attention.”

Over-saturation of embellished, or manufactured, risks has been the norm for the Left and many other groups for quite a long time. That’s why they exaggerated the turn out in D.C. – from a scientifically concluded 200,000 to a made-for-TV 800,000.

The Environmentalists did the same with ‘Global Warming’ and have scared the world into limiting freedom and curbing prosperity for the purposes of having more government control. Inflated risks, plus emotional appeals, equals hordes of misinformed people driven to “do something.”

And now they are training their sights on guns. They say the merely want to ban “Assault Weapons,” but since no one seems to have a hard definition for what those are it will makes it easier to shift the line toward more and more guns. Eventually, their same arguments about not “needing” this gun, or that one, will shift to guns in general.

Just like that, the “Anti-Fascists” will drive public policy toward banning and confiscating guns.

Hopefully, enough people see these kids and their guiding chaperones on the Left for what they are and remind them of what inalienable means in the 2018 elections.