As the anger and anguish
Indeed. And, some would add, how quickly we forget.
Fortunately, the students from Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School haven’t forgotten. In fact, they’ve been working diligently since the Valentine’s Day slaughter at their school to raise awareness among young people about what they can do to help bring about sensible, comprehensive gun safety legislation at the local, state and federal level.
A month after the shooting, their efforts resulted in the massive March For Our Lives rally that drew hundreds of thousands to Washington, D.C., and tens of thousands to rallies in scores of other cities around the country. Much more important, more than 1,000 high schools in nearly every state in the union signed on to run voter registration drives for eligible students. This is critical because, as the nonpartisan voter-registration organization HeadCount.org has noted, only 43 percent of 18-year-olds were registered to vote in 2016, and only 34 percent voted in the presidential election that year. In the 2014 midterms, less than 20 percent of eligible voters under 30 turned out, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Activist Tyler Suarez, a nephew of Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the 2012 shooting there, made the point succinctly in a tweet before the D.C. rally: “The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is 73 million millennials with a vote.”
Wisely, the smart, dedicated young people leading the March For Our Lives movement have recognized that gun violence isn’t a problem only for predominantly white suburban schools. It’s a problem — an epidemic — in neglected urban neighborhoods with majority black and Hispanic residents. And so, as The Washington Post reported on Monday, 20 teens from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gathered on the South Side of Chicago last Friday to join forces with teenage anti-violence activists from the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, share their common experiences with gun violence and canvass the surrounding area to register young voters. From there they’ll begin a 20-state summer bus tour to register even more young people and help them understand how important it is for them to vote.
As the teens told The Post, their goal is not to repeal the Second Amendment or eliminate guns (as if that were even possible in a country with, according to one estimate, nearly as many firearms as citizens). Rather, they want to encourage young people to jump into the political arena and use their voice and their vote to force lawmakers to pass commonsense gun safety legislation and to address the multiple issues that underlie gun violence — the chronic unemployment and crumbling public schools that suck the hope out of entire communities, for example. We’d add that they’ll be in a much better position then to call out the craven politicians who, after the next gun tragedy, try to retreat behind the empty platitudes of “thoughts and prayers.”
The news cycle is indeed churning, and because the administration of President Donald Trump is a fully involved dumpster fire of arrogance, ignorance, corruption and baldfaced lies, it shows no sign of slowing down. But the young people leading the March For Our Lives movement have kept their focus on their issue and are working hard to bring their message to as many of their peers as possible. Their voter-registration bus tour will swing through Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas over the next week or so, with July and August dates to be announced. The 2018 midterm elections are just four months away.
This is going to be interesting.