Reject the ‘March for Our Lives’

The March for Our Lives was nothing more than political theater. Young, would-be social activists and their handlers seized upon the trauma of our society in an effort to undermine, subvert, and destroy our laws, institutions, and principles. It’s as simple as that.

Progressives know they cannot win the rhetorical or intellectual battle with actual arguments, so they turn instead to soapboxing on tragedy. Knowing that they can’t simply remove the laws, traditions, and institutions that form our society, they seek instead to use emotion to shift control over the meaning of these laws, traditions, and institutions. The vehicle for this power shift is a loud and demanding form of social activism that seeks to overwhelm the public with rapid-fire media hits. One might even call it, as Joe Long did here at American Greatness, “Full Semi-Auto Activism.”

The reality is this movement has little capacity or desire keep our children safe. If safety was the object, there would be a focus on the sham that is the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO). BSO had officers on stand down while children were being murdered. The BSO worked with the Broward County School District (BCSD) to sandbag crime statistics by not arresting juveniles for certain crimes (as they failed to arrest the Florida shooter earlier) to “qualify for lucrative state and federal grants.” We call B.S., Sheriff Israel. The spin is never ending, there is nothing that progressives will not deny, obfuscate, or misrepresent.

Will Americans Give Up Their Sovereignty?
If Americans capitulate to the demands of this “movement,” they will effectively hand over the keys to the kingdom to nouveau Jacobins and their handlers on the promise of an elusive, if not impossible, salvation. In so doing, Americans would effectively surrender their sovereign power to shape the laws of this nation and ultimately determine its fate. When positive law supplants constitutional law, this is not the “power of the people” taking charge. Quite the opposite. It is the undermining of their solemn and sovereign authority, enshrined as it is in the Constitution, to the fleeting passions of a moment, driven by an emotional mob.

“I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence,” said 11-year-old Naomi Walder, a student at George Mason Elementary School and a key speaker at the march. “For far too long, these black girls and women have been just numbers,” she declared. “I am here to say never again for those girls too,” quoting the slogan of this anti-Second Amendment movement. This is the foulest form of identity politics, propping up children as its mouthpieces.

The African-American community needs the Second Amendment abolished so that all its troubles will suddenly be cured? Please. The problematic social and cultural phenomena plaguing minority communities is far more nuanced than Walder’s puppetmasters would like Americans to think.

Here is the truth that I am sure will have me showered with hatred and called a bigot. The majority—93 percent—of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. It is true that most murders are perpetrated within the same demographic, but Uniform Crime Reports data shows black criminals are more likely to kill non-blacks than non-black criminals are to kill blacks. Black people commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do, outpacing Latinos and Asians as well. U.S. Justice Department data show that between 1980 and 2008, blacks committed 52 percent of all homicides. Further, more black babies are aborted in New York City than are born. Abortion has killed more blacks nationally than crime, accidents, cancer, or AIDS. Around 13 million black babies have been aborted since 1973, and some 1,452 black babies are aborted every day in the United States. Around 72 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. A Harvard study found that among all U.S. high school graduates, 11 percent of blacks were proficient in math, while 13 percent were proficient in reading; just 8 percent of black males graduated high school in 2014 prepared for college-level curriculum.

Will Naomi Walder’s handlers put on a march for the millions of black children whose lives were extinguished before they saw the light of day? Do black lives only matter when they can be politicized? Will there be a march for fatherless black children, to whom the cycle of poverty and criminality are virtually guaranteed? These depressing statistics, not “social justice,” are the fruits of identity politics for America’s minorities—but don’t mention that to Ta-Nehisi Coates, he gets upset. The social and cultural ailments of blacks or any other demographic in America will not be remedied by the abolition of the Second Amendment, this is simply a diversion for progressives to distract from the abject failure of their public policy.

Revolution Calling
David Hogg has declared his generation will trigger “the beginning of a revolution,” presumably one that will see Americans disarmed. Somebody get that boy a reality check. Still, progressives love it. They adore this entitled child. Have we already forgotten that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro disarmed his citizens as he plunged the nation into a hellish nightmare?  

For all the social meliorism that drove these movements—from the Jacobins, to Stalin, to Mao—with promises of utopia, it was bloodshed, not security, that ensued. Robespierre’s regime saw dissidents tried as “enemies of the state.” Mao’s cultural revolution claimed some 60 million lives. Stalin’s push to build a new society culminated in ruthless police terror and bloody political purges.

“Terror is nothing more than prompt, severe inflexible justice,” declared Robespierre. The Jacobin promised the French a moral and egalitarian order (ring any bells?), he promised that cultural revolution would trigger the transformation necessary to create a better society. This was, by nature of its supposed intentions, a revolution based on social justice. Robespierre’s march for social justice supplanted the existing regime with a bloodthirsty one that subjected its citizens to the Reign of Terror.

No cultural or social or economic revolution in modern history has created a prosperous, secure, or equitable society—save one, the American Revolution, and it was carried out by an armed, vigilant, and sober minority against one of the most formidable empires in history. And it worked because it enshrined as the highest form of the people’s sovereignty, a constitution. When we violate it, we are chipping away at our own legitimacy and sovereignty.

Americans need to stand fast. They need to reject the demands of this movement. Equally important, we need to take the time to explain to our children why their demands that we skirt the laws and Constitution are antithetical to self-rule, and we need to castigate those who offer up our children as pawns in this scheme to snatch power from the people.

Just beneath the surface of this adolescent activism is something terrible, something that has thrust societies into chaos, and it is now at our doorstep threatening to deracinate the foundations of this nation. Americans should not and must not go quietly.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images