High school activist Emma Gonzalez. (Illustration by Seth L. Taylor, 2018.)
Emma Gonzalez’s Powerful March For Our Lives Speech In Full (Video)
(Editor’s Note: Truly, this speech is one of the most powerful speeches given in American history. — Mark L. Taylor)
The Guardian (3/25/18)
Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez – who had been a leading voice immediately after the attack on her school – took to the stage in Washington DC for six minutes and 20 seconds, much of that in silence. She says it was the amount of time it took a shooter to kill 17 people at her school in Florida last month.
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‘We share the stage’: White Suburban Liberals & Minority Activists Join Together For Needed Gun Reform
Words by Lois Beckett, pictures by Evelyn Hockstein
The Guardian (3/25/18)
There is no national day of protest marking the death of Edna Chavez’s brother. Like the teenagers killed in Parkland, Florida, last month, he was a high school student when he was shot.
“It was a day like any other day, sunset going down on South Central,” Chavez, 17, told a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people at the March for Our Lives in Washington on Saturday. “You hear pops, thinking they’re fireworks. They weren’t pops. You see the melanin on your brother’s skin turn gray.”
Chavez, now a high school student herself, asked the crowd to say her brother’s name. “Ricardo!” they called out. And then, as she paused, tears filling her eyes, they chanted it louder: “RI-CAR-DO! RI-CAR-DO!”
Saturday’s protests in Washington and across the world mark a profound shift in America’s gun control debate.
For decades, political analysts have said that Congress’s refusal to pass new gun laws was due to an “intensity gap” between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun control supporters.
Polls have long shown that a majority of Americans support stricter gun laws, but that majority has not organized, lobbied, protested or voted in primary elections with the discipline of the gun rights advocates, whose numbers are much smaller.
But the “intensity gap”, like the concept of “economic anxiety”, is dangerously vague, a talking point that conceals more than it reveals.
There has never been an “intensity gap” between NRA members, and the young activists and heartbroken parents in Oakland or St Louis or Miami. For decades, with media attention or without it, black and brown communities have pushed for stricter regulation of the gun industry and for laws that would keep guns out of the hands of at-risk teenagers and adults.
But the Americans most influenced by everyday gun murder are a minority, packed into a relatively small number of congressional districts.
Working alone, they’ve never had the votes in Congress to pass the gun control laws they want. They’ve needed allies – the allies from liberal white suburbs, who, at least in theory, support stricter gun control laws.
The “intensity gap” has always been an “empathy gap”, because those suburban allies have rarely shown up to fight for the lives of black and brown children – not unless their own schools, their own children, were threatened.
By bringing out hundreds of thousands of people in Washington and across the world, the Parkland students have shown more evidence that they might be able to close the intensity gap, and convince millions of Americans to vote in the 2018 election on a gun control platform. …
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Student Activist David Hogg: “You can hear the people in power shaking.”
Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg gave an impassioned speech during March for Our Lives in Washington.
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And The Ass Of Year Award Goes To: Rick Santorum, Who Advises ‘March For Our Lives’ Kids To Learn CPR Instead Of Rallying For Gun Laws
By Nina Golgowski
The HuffPost (3/25/18)
Former U.S. senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum suggested on Sunday that students concerned about gun violence in their schools should learn how to revive wounded people instead of asking lawmakers “to solve their problems.”
Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, made the remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union, one day after an estimated 200,000 people participated in the student-led March For Our Lives in Washington demanding stricter gun control laws.
“How about kids, instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations where there is a violent shooter,” he said.
Host Brianna Keilar pointed out that the students did take action by organizing the march. It followed a gunman killing 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in February.