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How to Talk About the Parkland Students
I learned something in pre-marital counseling about how to fight that I’ve taken with me when discussing difficult topics: When you need to say something controversial, sandwich your statement. Here is an example:
https://twitter.com/bethanyshondark/status/966104446328590336
Say a nice thing, make the thrust of your point, end with a nice thing.
In this case, the whole statement is true, and the fact that the pieces of bread, as they were, need to be said at all show just how low our political discourse has become.
.@AndersonCooper: "Sick conspiracy theories are cropping up" after a deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida https://t.co/4ZBJTAeLGC #KeepingThemHonest https://t.co/seizcbhNIB
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) February 21, 2018
The conspiracy theories that came up after Sandy Hook are becoming more mainstream (I saw them a great deal in response to that tweet), and then there’s a great deal of this:
The moment they decided to become gun control/confiscation activists they no longer get "victim protections". I can be empathetic towards their trauma and think they are a bunch of assholes trying to use gov't to oppress my rights.
— Net Wt 3.0oz (@t_ancap) February 21, 2018
We are not at war with children. Repeat: We are not at war with children.
Here’s the thing: The kids are not going to succeed. One of their best chances was in the Florida statehouse, involving a bill to limit the kind of weapon that just led to the deaths of over a dozen of their classmates and teachers. And yet, the bill failed, because it was bound to. They were on their home turf in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, had worldwide media fixated on the vote, and yet, it didn’t pass.
The Florida state House on Tuesday rejected a ban on many semiautomatic guns and large capacity magazines as dozens of survivors of last week’s school shooting headed to the state Capitol to turn their grief into political action.
Lawmakers voted down a motion to consider the ban during a session that opened with a prayer for the 17 people killed by a former student last Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The vote in the Republican-dominated body was 36-71.
Stoneman Douglas students in the gallery of the Capitol during the vote appeared stunned.
“It was just so heartbreaking to see how many (voters’) names were up there, especially after it was my school,” Sheryl Acquaroli, a 16-year-old junior from Stoneman Douglas, who was crying, later told “Anderson Cooper 360˚.” “It seemed almost heartless how they immediately pushed the button to say no.”
The students of Stoneman Douglas are not threats in any sense: they have no chance of changing gun policy. That is a cruel fact that their parents and the media should be making clear to children who are being retraumatized after becoming familiar with just how intractable restricting gun rights is in this country. While the media see in these students powerful advocates, they are using them in order to pursue a narrative. And when their efforts prove unsuccessful, their parents will be left to pick up the pieces of their children who first went through trauma, buried friends, and then were left to feel as though they failed.
Everything about what happened in Parkland is a tragedy, and we can’t lose sight of that fact. While we can (and should) debate the merits of different gun policy recommendations, the side of Second Amendment advocates needs to keep in mind that while the media are promoting these children, they are, in fact, children, and traumatized ones at that. If you have an issue with how the media is using their narrative, take it up with the adults.
Published in Guns
We should not debate the merits of gun policy. We should debate the merits of people policy. Brownard county school policy is what resulted in the carnage at the high school. It started way back with Trayvon Martin.
This is also posted on Henry’s post.
This from Sundance of The Conservative Tree House:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/19/school-shooting-was-outcome-of-broward-county-school-board-policy-now-local-and-national-politicians-weaponize-kids-for-ideological-intents/
Sulton Knish: Shooting Down Gun Control Memes.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2018/02/shooting-down-gun-control-memes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews+%28from+NY+to+Israel+Sultan+Reveals+The+Stories+Behind+the+News%29
IMO, a good third of gun policy is quite hard to get your head around. No one wants to put any effort in.
I agree, Bethany. These poor kids are being used to make an anti-gun statement, and their parents, no matter what they think about guns, should be ashamed. Your “sandwich statement” is important. I would also say that acknowledging the dilemma helps too: These kids feel passionate about protecting kids, and have been traumatized by events. Those are precisely the reasons, whether they were kids or not, for their taking the time to grieve, reflect and then when they’ve healed a bit, decide what to do next. I understand that “acting” keeps people from feeling helpless, but it’s not always the best decision.
This is happening on many levels. We need to be aware of this, and to respond at the appropriate level. Easier said than done, of course.
The first thing to realize is that there is a conspiracy and there are well indoctrinated activists who don’t always need a hieararchical command structure.
Another thing to realize is that since “if it bleeds it leads,” the hard left cadres behind this want children to be hurt and they will put them in a position to be hurt provided that there is a camera there to catch it… and they’ll make sure it’s caught. To give the devil her due, most of the cadres would prefer it if children don’t die, though they won’t refrain from capitalizing on the ones that do.
This has been the tactic for over half a century. The cadres in the 1960s “peace” demonstrations would distribute half bricks and big rocks among the kids and put them up front to throw them at the cops. Any kid hurt by a cop became proof of the narrative.
In that sense, the intifada began in the 1960s. The kids of those days educated today’s teachers, who promoted the social justice narrative beginning in kindergarten; today’s activist students are the fruits of that and their stories are heard… provided that they stick to the script.
Dissenting voices are not being heard on broadcast media and are being silenced on social media.
At least some of the children are also thoroughly indoctrinated and are “independently” (though with substantial teacher and parental approval) acting to promote the narrative they have been taught to believe. Don’t dismiss their agency, and while
They believe that they are in it for the long haul; some will change their minds about the SJW agenda but many will not. One part of the narrative is that unless we submit to what these children want, we are their enemies… which is what they have been taught.
Some of them are at war with us, and with the black and white purity of youth, want us to die. How far they will go with that, how much they can be molded to direct action, and how much they will pressure leftist administrators and legislators (and unprincipled “conservatives”) to act for them remains to be seen.
The media is not only “using their narrative” it has fed it to them and is rewarding them for pushing it.
As we saw from Pallywood, major news organizations are not above staging an event in the hopes of blood.
An emotional response from people close to such a tragedy is natural, predictable, even laudable — we’d have to wonder about anyone who wasn’t caught up in the passion of the moment.
However, preventing these freakishly rare and horrible events is a hard problem, one that has no quick nor perfect fix. We can look charitably upon those who grieve, while recognizing that they’re probably not currently in a state in which they can make thoughtful and productive suggestions. By all means, respect their grief and look kindly upon them. There’s virtue in that. But don’t mistake their passion for reason, and don’t let them delay the changes that might actually help to prevent the next such atrocity. That would be to betray future victims.
You make a very good point, OTLC. I recognized the rhetoric as Leftist–demonizing, demanding, anti-gun. It was clear they were articulate in mouthing the ideas, and probably didn’t realize how political it was. Or maybe they did.
Every day in the media is going to be “We hate conservatives and Donald Trump”.
The only difference will be the specific news stories which they focus upon at a specific time.
…
I am marking my 10th year of getting rid of my television set almost exactly 10 years ago this month when the Great Recession occurred, and I moved to a different location. I think I mainly had it to keep up with the War on Terror. The quality of television has been terrible in the 21st century, although some I can see how some people who like fiction may like some of the newer longer-form programs usually on pay television, but that’s not me.
Getting rid of my television was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Many conservatives would approve of a 14 year old Jewish boy who woke up in time to daven with a minyan every morning before public school, or a Catholic boy or girl who was a regular communicant and lived chastely – and would think that this was a sign of maturity and independent adoption of the faith of their family and community.
Despite this, we prefer to think of teens indoctrinated from K-whatever grade they are in with the social justice agenda as unthinking children being unwittingly used. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.
They are being taught that tomorrow belongs to them.
And we are just old and in the way.
They may be children but most of them are old enough to be charged as adults for crimes. And many are 18 and therefore not legally children. So the point is somewhat overstated.
Our 18 is not their 18
I would argue the MSM is abusing these children by using them as pawns for 1) ratings when they show the kids’ emotional reactions, and 2) to further the anti-gun agenda.
These kids are in high school. Maybe we should stop thinking of them as “children”, and simply call them “minors”. Heck, some of them no doubt are 18 and older, thus they are adults.
Another way to think about it is that being close to the tragedy should earn these students, teachers, and parents leniency in our judgment: that is, if they make suggestions that are unproductive, counter-productive, wrong-minded, and generally unwise, we can nonetheless excuse them for it, given the circumstances. But being close to the tragedy doesn’t lend them authority. That seems to be the delusion under which our “news” people labor, that these unfortunate, traumatized individuals somehow speak with more authority than more thoughtful people, by virtue of their grief. That’s simply mistaken.
Truer words were never spoken. I’ve been thinking about a post on the topic of “Moral Authority” for quite a while now. The left uses it to grant the speaker immunity from dissent and criticism, such as the Khan family’s performance during the 2016 election run-up. IMHO, the father was a total jerk. Being a Gold Star parent did not mean he was immune from criticism once he entered the political arena.
The same goes for Senator McCain. Yes, he was brutally tortured by the VC, but that didn’t mean his opinion on our actions in the War On Terror concerning waterboarding trumped the legal basis John Yoo et al. came up with. IMHO, waterboarding is not torture.
No, there is only one person that has absolute moral authority on any subject at any time in any place – and that is Christ Jesus, my Lord and Savior, and God in human form.
Well said.
I don’t really see any point in further debating gun control policy. I don’t want to sound heartless, but these school shootings are very rare, are a tiny, tiny proportion of gun violence, and cannot be prevented by any remotely viable gun control policy. We know this. It has been debated over and over and over again, for years. The real problem is ignorance on the part of people who think that some simple, minor gun control legislation will fix this problem.
Lots of terrible things happen. Tens of thousands of people die in auto accidents every year. We don’t stop and say, hey, let’s have a debate over whether to outlaw cars! That would be silly.
Bethany, you may be very knowledgeable about this, but I don’t get that impression. The idea that outlawing the AR-15 would prevent this type of tragedy is just silly. There are many, many different types of gun that could be used to commit a mass-murder. There are something like 300 million guns in the country already, and there is no chance whatsoever of confiscating them. One could easily carry out an attack like this with a semi-auto handgun, or many types of hunting rifles, or many different types of “assault” rifles (like an SKS or AK-47, not just an AR-15), or even just four or five old-fashioned six-shooters.
The most viable defense, as has been pointed out by many others, is to make sure that schools are not defenseless, target-rich environments. But this is not perfect, and does not satisfy the emotional desire to “do something” so that tragedies “will never happen again.”
It is juvenile thinking to believe that we can “do something” — generally something unspecific, or if specific, then silly — in order to prevent all future tragedies. People need to grow up, and I’m not talking about the poor kids from Florida. They just need to grieve, and blame the perpetrator, and probably (in this instance) blame the authorities who were actually warned about this particular shooter.
I would ask anyone who considers these children as authorities on this subject how they feel about “conflict of interest” issues in general: Should a judge preside over a case involving a loved one? Should police investigate personal enemies? If not, why not? Because there is reason to assume that they might let their emotions affect their judgement. It’s interesting that this same desire for dispassion is not favored in lawmaking, a process which is constantly draped in hysterical pleas and fear-mongering. Does anyone think that a hysteric whose emotions obscure all but one limited angle of an issue is going to address the issue prudently and a with careful avoidance of negative consequences? Or are the emotions used a smokescreen to get the rest of us to bypass our reason and accept lawmaking that doesn’t meet a respectable and honest standard?
It is mistaken. It is also part of the indoctrination that has replaced education; it is not merely the news people who labor under taht delusion. In almost any elite college classroom, “Speaking as a….” is thought to be more than sufficient authority. If you dispute that authority, students, faculty and staff have been trained to perceive that as an attack.
This is not directly germane to the Parkland shooting, but it shows the thinking that is under discussion from another angle. It was prompted by the news that Olympic champion gymnast Aly Raisman, was living up to the origin of her sport’s name by appearing nude in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She has slogans written on her body, slogans like “trust yourself,” “live for you,” and “abuse is never okay” (she recently testified in the sex abuse trial of USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar who had abused her and hundreds of other young women.
She had this to say concerning her decision to appear in SI:
Christopher DeGroot at Taki Magazine sees it like this:
That is to say, Ms. Raisman wants to be able to dictate how we think about her. We are not allowed to think anything other than what she wants us to think; if we do there is something wrong with us. People taught to think this way are ripe for manipulation and exploitation.
The obvious solution. Sporting events and business venues have security to one degree or another, so why not schools? Why not a proximity badge card-reading system so only those with a need to be there can enter (visitor badges made available as needed)?
Why aren’t metal detectors and x-ray machines another answer? Security cameras?
We on the right have a tendency to believe that gun control advocates are arguing in bad faith. There’s a reason for that – most of them are arguing in bad faith. They’ll tell you that they want “common sense gun control,” but most of them really want “ban and confiscate.” Some of them may actually be telling the truth. When they propose, for example, a limit on the capacity of magazines, some of them may actually want just that. But we have good reason to suspect that if we agreed to their demands today, they will just move on to a new set of demands tomorrow, all incremental steps on the road to “ban and confiscate.” It makes it very difficult to have a good faith and rational discussion when one side is arguing in bad faith.
Another reason it is difficult to have a good faith and rational discussion is that the left relies almost exclusively on its twin tactics of emotionalize and demonize. None of the people who propose “common sense gun control that would prevent this kind of tragedy” will ever tell you what kind of gun control would have prevented this kind of tragedy. Instead, they just tell us how saddened and outraged they are – as if any of us are not saddened and outraged by the actions of this mad man. That’s the emotionalize. They imply that anyone who doesn’t agree to their demands (no matter how ineffective those demands would be) actually wants more school shootings.
Then there’s the demonize. The demon, in this case, is the NRA. Anyone who doesn’t agree to any gun control demand has simply been bought off by the NRA. It is impossible that ordinary citizens or legislators, thinking for themselves, have reached a different conclusion. All opposition to their demands originates with the demon NRA, exercising Jedi mind control over the weak-minded populace. Again, it is very hard to have a good faith, rational conversation with someone who won’t even concede that you are a moral agent with a brain of your own.
Maybe it’s just me, but I get resentful of attempts to emotionally manipulate me. I get resentful when someone says I am a weak-minded automaton, incapable of thinking for myself. I can empathize with the trauma these kids have experience, but I am still resentful when I see these tactics being used.
Bloomberg has spent 1.2 million in Minnesota over the last two elections. You can’t get one Democrat to show you a white paper of what they want, here. The leaders of gun grabbers in Minnesota look like fools. They obviously haven’t had any media training or communications training at all, even though there’s plenty of money for it. It’s just a naked power grab.