Saturday, April 21, 2018
Good Morning!
1 Doubling down on the Parkland thugs. I was chided yesterday when I wrote of this posed picture of the puppet Parkland student anti-gun hysterics…
...”They look like potential home invaders: if I see kids with those expressions hanging around my property, I’m getting a gun.” The commenter, who usually is more circumspect, deliberately misconstrued my clear implication that I would buy said gun to protect home and hearth from the threatened home invaders and invaders, should it ever come to that, not these specific children, obnoxious as they are. But this is the current MO of anti-gun, pro-citizen disarming activist: they create distortion and confusion while simultaneously demonizing their opponents. Those five, sullen, vaguely threatening teens above are especially good at it.
The photo itself is visual bullying. It mimics the bad-boy thug-vibes of various hip-hop and punk rock groups who use promotional photos to show they defy authority, hate people with real jobs and would stomp on your face if they had a chance. Photos like this, for example…
…of the band Limp Bizkit, and no, I don’t want to anyone looking like them lurking in my neighborhood either. These expressions and postures are menacing and intended to be, as is most of the rhetoric from David Hogg (the one with the “I’m about to kill you” glare in the center of the Time photo) and his fellowship. Notwithstanding the cynical and transparent packaging of the Parkland students, it is way past time for adults and those interested in serious policy debate to pronounce these over-their-heads baby demogogues for what they are now: media created monsters, funded and trained to carry a calculated anti-Second Amendment message in uncivil and dishonest terms that no adult could get away with.
It isn’t surprising that they are embracing their celebrity–most people embrace sudden celebrity, kids most of all—even though they are both being exploited, and exploiting themselves, in their case, the tragic deaths of their classmates. They have been led to believe that they are consequence-proof, like the bespectacled kid who harasses and annoys bigger children is “punch-in-the face” proof, because it’s taboo to hit someone with glasses. The Hogg Bullies can call elected officials corrupt, and murderers, and fools, proclaiming fake statistics and fearmongering at Defcon 5 levels, but if someone responds with the sharp rebukes such irresponsible discourse usually requires, he or she is told, in shock, ‘How dare you! These are grieving children!’
No, they are not. Not any more. They are full-fledged monsters engineered by the Left to distort civic discourse and policy debate regarding gun policy, allowing anti-gun zealots to bypass facts and law to go straight to mainlining fear and emotion into public consciousness.
For the second time in two months, thousands of students across the country walked out of class as part of a National School Walkout to demand action on gun reform. As with the earlier walk-out, the message was no more helpful or specific than “do something,” while expressing the irrational fear that the Hoggites have been allowed/ encouraged/funded to infect students with in pursuit of an anti-Second Amendment agenda.
The ends justify the means, after all.
Stoneman Douglas freshman Ryan Servaites pointed to a school shooting yesterday in Ocala, Florida, where a student was wounded in the ankle by a teen with an unlicensed firearm. “Enough is enough. Children are dying. Children are being hurt. We won’t stop. This is why,” he said.Oh.
What? Children are dying of all sorts of things,
and being hurt. Students sitting in class are much, much safer than if they were riding in cars or on bicycles. Does Ryan really think he is in mortal peril in class? Citizens in any free society that is not a police state are always in more danger than when their cities and states resemble prisons. Apparently their teachers haven’t explained this.
In one of the D.C. protests, Hiam Baidas of Falls Church, Virginia said the country “needs laws making it more difficult to buy guns.” More difficult for who, exactly? Details, details. “Right now I’m 18 years old, I live right across the street from Walmart, and I can go buy a gun — and I don’t think that’s OK,” she said.Oh.
What? Are 18-year-olds adults, or not? The idiot in Ocala was 19 years old. Should he have been able to buy a gun? Does Hiam have any understanding of the issues here? No, clearly not. But according to the Parkland Principle, her policy positions on individual rights should be accorded special deference.
In New York City, demonstrator Arielle Geismar, 16, said she wants gun laws “tightened.” And what kind of tightening will relieve you and student hysterics like you from a completely irrational fear of being shot, Arielle?”I’ve grown up in the generation of students who are realizing that we have lockdown drills all the time. We live with the constant fear that there is the possibility of a school shooting. No one should have to live like that,” she said.
Oh. What? Is she afraid of lockdown drills? I agree, they do make children unnecessarily anxious. That’s not the Second Amendment’s fault. If Arielle is “in constant fear” of a school shooting, it is the Parkland students’ irresponsible fearmongering (and the enabling of it by the Left and its complicit news media) that is at fault, not national gun policy, not the NRA, and not the second Amendment.
I will tip my metaphorical hat to whoever had the idea of using the Parkland students as messengers of the radical anti-gun message, because to treat their bad arguments and uncivil methods with the rebuttals they deserve would invite the “How dare you!” response. But they are just monsters now, or, if you prefer, entitled bullies, abusing their positions and status, spreading misinformation, hate and fear.
They are accountable.