Tag: NRA

Five Points To Counter The NRA

The next time you hear someone repeating pro-gun NRA propaganda, respond with these five points:

1. Gun laws save lives. Consider the federal assault weapons ban. After it became law in 1994, gun massacres – defined as instances of gun violence in which six or more people were shot and killed – fell by 37 percent. The number of people dying from mass shootings fell by 43 percent. But when Republicans in Congress let the ban lapse in 2004, gun massacres more than doubled.

2. The Second Amendment was never intended to permit mass slaughter. When the Constitution was written more than 200 years ago, the framers’ goal was permit a “well-regulated militia,” not to enable Americans to terrorize their communities.

3. More guns have not, and will not, make us safer.More than 30 studies show that guns are linked to an increased risk for violence and homicide. In 1996, Australia initiated a mandatory buyback program to reduce `the number of guns in private ownership. Their firearm homicide rate fell 42 percent in the seven years that followed.

4. The vast majority of Americans want stronger gun safety laws. According to Gallup, 96 percent of Americans support universal background checks, 75 percent support a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales, and 70 percent favor requiring all privately owned guns to be registered with the police. Even the vast majority of gun owners are in favor of common-sense gun safety laws.

5. The National Rifle Association is a special interest group with a stranglehold on the Republican Party. In 2016, the group spent a record $55 million on elections. Their real goal is to protect a few big gun manufacturers who want to enlarge their profits.

America is better than the NRA. America is the young people from Parkland, Florida, who are telling legislators to act like adults. It’s time all of us listen.

Student Activism: A Force For Change

This month, a school full of children suffered an enormous tragedy. Again. Seventeen young people were gunned down inside a Florida high school but instead of devolving into the same cycle of meaningless debate, we’re seeing a new moment of student leadership. In a time of crushing grief and anger and fear, these students have chosen to rise up and fill the vacuum of leadership that many of our leaders have created. And they’ve been joined in their activism by their peers all across the country.

For decades, the NRA and the politicians backed by them have stymied any effort to push for stronger gun legislation. After Sandy Hook and Pulse and Las Vegas, efforts failed and the conversation faded away time and again. The callousness with which NRA-backed Republicans have shirked away from their responsibilities to play a role is sickening. Again and again, we go through the same ritual — tragedy, debate, defeat, repeat.

We’ve gone as far as convincing ourselves that there’s nothing we can do — as if we’re doomed to eternally suffer these tragedies. But we know what the issue is and we know the steps that needed to be taken. At the moment, the only thing holding us back is the lack of courage it takes for politicians to do away with the NRA and the checks they write. It’s a horrible reason and one that these student activists have now dedicated themselves to ending.

I, for one, think they’ll succeed.

The poise, grace, and passion that these students have conducted themselves with has been inspiring. Their movement is a heart-wrenching call to action from our youngest generation, a rebirth of student activism which may feel new to us now, but I know the power that student activism can have.

As students across the country engaged in Brown v. Board litigation, at 12, my mother joined that fight and sued Western High School in Baltimore so she could desegregate the school when she was 15. She would become part of the first class of black girls to attend that high school from freshman year through graduation. Along with young men and women across the country, they fought for their rights and the rights of young people that would follow them.

My mother raised me on protests. At Columbia, participating in a protest against the university’s plan to tear down the site of Malcolm X’s assassination would get me suspended. It was the first student suspension for activism in nearly three decades, when the famed protests against the Vietnam War rippled through college campuses nationwide.

During my suspension, I went to work for the NAACP in Mississippi, where I trained as an organizer. During my time there, I met other incredible student activists, like Stacey Abrams and Derrick Johnson. This training would come in handy during the uprisings in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. I found myself in a church teaching young people how to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience that would maintain the purity of their message, protect them, protect innocent bystanders, and protect members of the police seeking to keep the peace.

Student activists have the ability to be the loudest and most powerful voices. They’re not hemmed in by the equivocating and hedging that hampers most political discourse. These students know what will keep them safe and they’re not going to stop until they accomplish the change they want to see.

Student activists, and these student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas in particular, are the best of us. They’ll do things we’ve told ourselves are impossible.

And I’ll be here, doing everything I can to help them.