Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/20/eligible-to-vote-in-2018.html
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Good on these kids. Teenagers can see the active-shooter drills as the security theater they are. The Florida shooter was able to throw all of that school’s active-shooter training to shit just by pulling the fire alarm. It’s the modern day version of “be sure to duck under your desk when the H-bombs start raining down.”
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As I think about these current issues…we’ve seen this before, haven’t we?
Back during the cold war, we taught students in schools “bomb drills”. They were told to hide under desks in case a nuclear bomb was dropped from the good ol’ Soviet Union. It is entirely analogous to today…
Then: Instead of the adults and politicians sitting down at the peace table and finding a way to coincide peacefully and deescalate their hostility, we taught kids to prepare for nuclear holocaust.
Now: Instead of the adults and politicians sitting down and enacting reasonable gun control laws and prevention of attacks like this, we teach kids to prepare for an active shooting situation in school.
The times…they do not change.
EDIT: didn’t even realize @Brainspore said the exact same thing.
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Nah, they’re good thinking for themselves.
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Nowadays the sobbing conservative woman would be crying “Won’t SOMEBODY please think of the gun owners??”
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Good luck, they’ll need it.
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I’m quite encouraged by this potential hornet’s nest of a student political movement. I think that pols and the NRA’s status quo should be worried long-term.
I too agree with a previous BB poster on a related topic that these young people today have a pretty solid social consciousness and their interactions are world-wide. Sure, I’m growing more into the ol’ “Get off my lawn” kinda guy these days, but I always have faith that the young people know more about their slice of the world that we think they do. After all, we turned out okay, right?
Never forget Saint Bowie via The Breakfast Club:
“And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through”
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It’s even worse than security theater or making students complacent about the threat - it’s actively training students to be sacrificial lambs at the same time. (And we now know that even that doesn’t work.) It’s so perverse. Students absolutely should be standing up, saying “fuck this” to these drills and protesting. It’s far more productive (and protective).
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I find it odd that I haven’t seen more people talking about this. You’re exactly right, Parkland had everything Republicans claim will protect children. The school had an armed guard and regularly participated in active-shooter drills, some good that did.
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That’s how you make youngsters Americans. Empower them, they’ll soon be running things anyways…
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Give teachers guns
Give all the students guns
Open every roll call with a round of suppressing fire
Build the school out of guns
Make all the guns out of smaller guns
Gun the guns gun gun guns
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The answer* is going to be arming school teachers and staff. Trump and Rubio and the rest of them are going to hold their listening events and make their Serious Faces when the students talk, and then hold a press conference that makes clear that they are sick and tired of these mass shootings and are going to do something about them. They’re going to make clear that only they have the moral courage to make the hard choice of arming teachers and football coaches to protect these beautiful, innocent children from the dangers against which Democrats would leave them defenseless.
*not necessarily the right answer, but the answer nonetheless
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I know. Remember when Thinking of the Children was so obvious, it was a joke to cry for it? Whoever thought we’d end up in a time when we had to seriously say “No, but seriously, we do actually have to think about the children…”
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An argument could even be made that the drills reinforce the idea of a mass shooting in future shooters, since most are executed by students or former students. If the Florida shooter had participated in past drills, the idea of disrupting the plan by pulling the fire alarm could have even come to him during a drill.
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Most high-school seniors will be old enough to vote in the 2018 midterms, and almost current high-school students will be eligible to vote in the 2020 elections.
Students now in freshman year of HS first year of middle school were in kindergarten in 2012, when the Sandy Hook killer took 20 of their contemporaries. They’ve lived all their lives with the prospect of needless death caused by easily obtained powerful firearms hanging over them. In 2024 they’ll be able to vote.
Right now, the leading wave of Millenials born in the mid-1980s is now reaching the age when they’ll be sending their own young children to nursery and kindergarten. They can vote now, and Millenials are finally overtaking Boomers in electoral clout.
The NRA, the politicians in their thrall, and run-of-the-mill gun-nuts who won’t give an inch of ground on sensible gun control are all fooling themselves if they think that these kinds of protests will just blow over. They can (and, as we’ll see in this thread, will) wheel out all the usual fallacies and distractions to preserve the right of an exurbanite to own an AR-15 to defend his McMansion, but sometimes between 2018 and 2024 demographics will make any politician who accepts money from the NRA as popular as those who might have taken money from the tobacco industry.
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My kid’s participating in the walkout on March 14 at their school, and I’ll be at the high school to support the kids and intervene if administration behaves inappropriately.
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Not that you are advocating for it, but, yes, and then the completely disgruntled, woefully under-paid teachers will start suicide-themselves-by-cop all over the place. Did you hear about the postal worker who went “Teacher”?
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Somebody needs to talk to those kids with the “Second Amendment Must Be Amended” signs and explain to them how terrible of a concession they are giving.
The Second Amendment already allows for gun control. Period.
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Yes, it provides for organized militias made of local residents to be armed.
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