March for our lives will begin change with the ballot box

Saturday's “March for Our Lives” was the epicenter of a decades long effort to have gun laws in the nation that would keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill and structure protective barriers to end what has become an increasingly common occurrence in America - mass shootings.

Less than a generation ago they seemed random, as some of us remembered, in the shooting on August 1, 1966 when “Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower with three rifles, two pistols, and a sawed-off shotgun. The 25-year-old architectural engineering major and ex-Marine—who had previously complained of searing headaches and depression—had already murdered his mother, Margaret, and his wife, Kathy, earlier that morning. He fired his first shots just before noon, aiming with chilling precision at pedestrians below,” recalled Texas Monthly.

“At the time, there was no precedent for such a tragedy. Whitman “introduced the nation to the idea of mass murder in a public space,” noted executive editor Pamela Colloff in her 2006 oral history of the shootings,.”By the time he was gunned down by an Austin police officer early that afternoon, he had shot 43 people, thirteen of whom died.”

A generation later in a public consciousness defined by shootings in Columbine, Sandy Hook Elementary, the movie theater in  Aurora Colorado, and now the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, we are confronted with a reality that has scourged the consciousness of our young people, who standing for their very lives lead a demonstration of tens of thousands in Washington, D.C. saying that “Enough is Enough” and “Arms are for Hugging”,

The youthful organizers also harnessed a wealth of celebrity support from Paul McCartney, the last surviving Beatle, protesting the shooting of John Lennon in 1980, to the nine-year-old granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Yolanda Renee King, the nine-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King, who said: “I have a dream that enough is enough,” young Miss King, noted and in a simple coda, simply stated, “and that this should be a gun-free world.”

As the US has grown increasingly violent, especially in urban areas, these mass shootings served to underscore the need for what has been labelled common sense guidelines: limiting the age to 21 that someone can purchase gun, expanding background checks and banning the use of bump stocks so that rifles can shoot row after row of ammunition, like a machine gun; all measures opposed by the most powerful lobbying organization in the country, the National Rifle Association, who has countered earlier resistance like the Brady Bill, and others, with phrases like “People kill people, not guns.”

Reaction to any change has also been recently met by incredulous statements, such as “Former U.S. senator Rick Santorum [who] on Sunday dismissed efforts by young survivors of last month's Florida school shooting to change gun laws, saying they should instead learn CPR and work on halting bullying,” reported USA Today.

Santorum was a guest on CNN's State of the Union one day after March for Our Lives and said: "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 that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.”

As we have observed before, overcoming this type of mentality will be the hardest to do to pass laws that can protect innocent lives, and to counter arguments that are tightly wound with either a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, or a belief that only an arsenal of weapons can offer protection.

One unfortunate note: mass murders, while less than general homicide, has increased from 1983 to 2011, from 200 days, to 64 days, now. Even now, as of this writing there is one that is probably being planned

The reaction from the White House, to Saturday’s events, was cautious, if a bit tepid: “we applaud these young organizers in American exercising their First Amendment rights.”

In another weak response, The New Yorker reported that, “The students marched on Saturday, the day after Congress had departed for its spring recess, and the spending bill that Donald Trump signed on Friday had included three meagre actions to address gun violence: fifty million dollars in grants for school-security measures; attempts to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System; and a clarification of the terms of the Dickey Amendment that will now allow for research into the effects of gun violence (although the amendment still bans the use of government funding to promote gun control).”

The day, in all ways, there were 800 adjoining protests, and continuing across the ocean in Berlin and Tokyo, where there were supporting demonstrations, belonged to the young people, and “It was a full day where only teenagers spoke on the nationally-televised stage in Washington, because they started all this, and they continued it full of eloquence and resolve and optimism — perhaps optimism, most of all,” reported the Sun-Sentinel.

They noted, that they owned those protests with “David Hogg saying, “Let’s put the USA over the NRA.” and  “Jaclyn Corin saying, “Thank you for standing up — we are on the right side of history.”

In one of the strongest statements, she also said, “. . .  because we have nothing to lose, we don't have an election to lose,  we don’t have a job to lose,” to The New York Times, that probably spoke for all of her cohorts.

To effect the change that is needed, we have acknowledged, before, and will continue to say, again, that we, as a society, cannot afford to fail to understand that mental illness is real and is not just “crazy people scripted for the camera, and not real life; as easy to dismiss as leaving a darkened movie theater. . . . and as palpable, as the days are long;” indeed, our failure fail to grasp the enormity of these unaddressed problems, and failure to find solutions,” has led us to this point where our young daughters,and sons, are begging us to change.

Part of that change is going to occur, as promised by the youth, and that change is going to be in the ballot box,  and sure to be seen in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, and, “In Parkland on Saturday, Sari Kaufman, a Stoneman Douglas sophomore, urged people to “turn this moment into a movement” that would push out of office any politician who took money from the National Rifle Association.

“They think we’re all talk and no action,” she said to loud applause and cheers, and urged the crowd to prove politicians wrong by voting in huge numbers.

“Remember that policy change is not nearly as difficult as losing a loved one,” she said. “Don’t just go out and vote: Get 17 other people to go out and vote.” the Times also reported.

Perhaps the most memorable take-away was this: ““To the leaders, skeptics and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent: Wait your turn,” said the first speaker Cameron Kasky, 17, a junior at Stoneman Douglas who last month challenged Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, to stop accepting donations from the National Rifle Association.

“Welcome to the revolution,” Kasky said.