The reaction of some conservatives to students activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after the latest gun massacre was sadly predictable. Some students received obscene letters and death threats.

South Carolina governor Henry McMaster bashed students who participated in National Walkout Day on March 15: “It sounds like a protest to me. … It’s a political statement … and it’s shameful.” According to McMaster, “school children, innocent school children, are being used as a tool by left-wing groups to further their own agenda.” (And a wicked agenda it is — keeping students, teachers and school personnel safe from mass shootings.)

Gov. McMaster stated the walkout was a protest, as if that was something inherently evil. (An interesting comment in as much as South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860.) One would think a governor would know enough of his nation’s history to realize that protest and civil disobedience are as American as apple pie. Without the indignation and protests of colonists in the 1770s against British rule, there wouldn’t have been a war for independence at that time.

The most important social, political and economic reform movements in this country began as protests, including the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the women’s right to vote movement, the 1960s civil rights movement and the environmental movement.

After the Florida gun massacre, a number of individuals pushed for raising the minimum age for buying assault rifles from 18 to 21 while others wanted the purchase age to be 25. Sounds good until you examine the ages of recent killers who used semi-automatic weapons. Syed Farook, who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California, was 28 years old. Omar Marteen, the killer of 49 people in a Florida nightclub, was 29.

If age 25 doesn’t work, let’s make it 40 years of age to purchase AR-15-style weapons of mass murder. That wouldn’t have stopped 42-year-old Michael McDermott, who killed seven people in Massachusetts using a semi-automatic weapon, a shotgun and a pistol. How about age 55? Stephen Paddock (the perpetrator of the largest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history), who killed 59 people and wounded 527 more in Las Vegas, was 64 years old. Investigators learned that Paddock bought some of the weapons eight years prior to the massacre, when he was 56 years old.

Bottom line: There is no “safe” age for purchasing semi-automatic rifles as the murderers who use these weapons are both young and old and all ages in between.

And what would a gun massacre be without conspiracy theory crazies saying it never happened, that the Parkland shooting was just another manufactured tragedy in a long line of hoaxes perpetrated by the “Zionist-controlled U.S. government.” The “truth” is there for the reading and seeing, according to a Nodisinfo.com article: “Parkland Florida High School Shooting a Hoax Proven in Pictures.” The photos are so obviously cut-and-paste creations it’s laughable — but available for the conspiracy theory inclined to see and believe.

No less insane is a mass shooting prevention strategy offered by libertarian author and columnist Megan McArdle shortly after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. She argued that since gun laws cannot prevent mass shootings, people under attack should be encouraged to “gang rush shooters, rather than follow their instinct to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sort of mass shootings would be less deadly.”

Along with “reading, writing and ‘rithmatic,” we can add “rush the shooter” to the school curriculum and commence these lessons from day one of the first grade.

“What did you learn on your very first day of school, sweetheart?”

“Well Mommy, we sang, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ then learned to rush the shooter — to sacrifice our lives so the shooter can only kill a few of us instead of many children.”

School Superintendent David Helsel of Pennsylvania’s Blue Mountain School District announced shortly after the Parkland massacre that a bucket of rocks will be placed in classrooms for students to throw at armed intruders. Helsel stated, “We always strive to find new ways to keep our students safe.” If only those 6- and 7-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School would have rushed the shooter while throwing rocks at him.

At the height of the Cold War, with the nuclear-armed USSR an ever-present threat, students were taught to “duck and cover” in the event of an attack. Today, with the powerful NRA and the proliferation of military-style rifles, we can teach children to “rush the shooter” in the event of a semi-automatic-carrying assailant.

Former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum stated that instead of working to pass “phony gun laws,” students should learn CPR. That’s a good skill to have if your response to school massacres is rush the shooter. During the CPR class, students can fill out organ donor cards as the first wave of “rushers” will certainly be killed. They could also take carpentry classes and learn to build coffins for their gunned-down friends and teachers. (After being severely criticized for his CPR remark, Santorum later said that he misspoke. Would the former Pennsylvania senator have retracted his statement had he not been denounced for it, and how many people agree with his original assertion?)

After Rush Limbaugh finished his usual inane blather — that everything the Parkland students were doing was “right out of the Democratic Party’s various playbooks” in their opposition to the NRA and guns — he said something of interest.

Limbaugh noted that every three to five generations, a generation comes along and states, “‘We reject the way our grandparents and parents live.’ And they don’t want any part of it. And they reform. They try to take their lives and the country in a different direction. Could this current generation of Millenials be that generation?”

Regarding the proliferation of guns, especially military-style weapons and the death they deliver, let us hope Millenials are that generation.

P.S. What does a round from a high-muzzle velocity rifle such as an AR-15 do to the human body? Dr. David Newman of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City states that a bullet from such a weapon “destroys whole areas of body. With a bone that’s been shot with a standard-issue caliber handgun, you’ll see a break, a hole in the bone. … But a high-muzzle weapon shatters that bone into hundreds of microscopic pieces in a way that cannot be repaired. … It’s now worthless tissue. You can’t believe that a bullet could do this amount of damage.” An AR-15 can take down a grown man in a heartbeat. Imagine the damage inflicted on the 50-pound body of a 6-year-old.

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale, retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources:

Alter, C. (April 2, 2018) “The Young and the Relentless,” pp. 24-31, Time

Chasmar, J. (March 15, 2018) “South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster calls student walkout a ‘shameful political statement,'” Washington Times, www.washingtontimes.com

Follman, M., G. Aronsen and D. Pan (March 10, 2018) U.S. Mass Shootings, 1982-2018 Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com

“Megan McArdle calls for children to be trained to run at active shooters” (accessed 2018) Media Matters, www.mediamatters.com

“‘The Dot Com Killer’ — Mucko” (accessed 2018) Murderpedia, http://murderpedia.com

“Parkland Florida High School Shooting Hoax Proven in Pictures,” (Feb. 17, 2018) Nodisinfo, Nodisinfo.com, http://nodisinfo.com

Pinto, J. and L. Ellefson (March 28, 2018) “Santorum says he misspoke in telling kids to learn CPR rather than advocate for gun control,” CNN, www.cnn.com

Shannon, J. (March 23, 2018) “Pennsylvania school district: Intruders ‘will be stoned’ by students armed with rocks,” USA Today, www.usatoday.com

Watkins, E. (March 26, 2018) “Santorum: Instead of calling for gun laws, kids should take CPR classes,” CNN, www.cnn.com