After the 'March for our Lives', Rick Santorum made the absurd suggestion the Parkland students were wasting their time marching and that they would be better off learning first aid. In his words: “How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes".
ER doctors quickly pointed out the folly of a student trying to administer aid to a victim of a high powered bullet wound - possibly under fire. An abashed Santorum retreated from his initial foolishness but still diminished the importance of students marching to protest school shootings.
Parkland student, Lauren Hogg, offered an incisive analysis of Santorum's sanctimony: “The fact that he’s saying CPR when my friends are dying on my floor and nothing is being done about it is just horrible. I think he’s just using it as a distraction to get their attention away from guns.” And in saying, so she laid bare the tactics of the NRA, its political poodles, and the barking pro-gun punditariat.
When this hegemony of gun zealots feel any push-back to their gun absolutism, they rely on their standard playbook: distract, disparage, demean - and conjure up the chimera of gun confiscation.
Fox News's Tomi Lahren was quick to the barricades with heated rhetoric. She lathered her Twitter followers and Fox News acolytes with the claim: "First step to oppression is disarming citizenry."
Not done, she added this ill-conceived tweet: "Simply being anti-NRA is not a solution. March FOR something, not just against everything." It takes a commitment to ideology over facts to claim that the 'March for our Lives' isn't "for" something.
Minnesota Rep. Mary Franson added her voice when she also drew a direct line from calls for sensible gun regulations to a feverishly imagined gun grab. On Facebook, she wrote: “And there you have it friends. The anti gunners, the high school students who speak for all, aren’t interested in an ‘inch.’ They want the mile. They want your guns. Gone.”
Franson upped the ante by using a 1938 Hitler quote about state indoctrination to compare the student marchers to the Hitler Youth: "after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years." It's offensive - and it's absurd. Hitler was the state - the Parkland students are protesting state indifference. Let's ask who is indoctrinated.
The gun-grab fabulism survived eight years of the Obama presidency, and it persists even though the government is now solidly in the hands of the NRA.
Beyond the gun-grab paranoia, there is the fear of liberals in the shadows pulling strings for some dark purpose.
Take Fox's Tucker Carlson. In his opinion, the March For Our Lives was backed by “wealthy and powerful people, billionaire Mike Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo and many others”. Leaving aside the hyperbole, it is chutzpah for Carlson to be shocked that there is money in politics.
Then there is the lunatic fringe. Frances Swaggert provides an example. Jimmy's widow hit the exacta. She claimed the Parkland students were used as “pawns” by liberal billionaires like George Soros. And she dragged in the disarmed and doomed Jews meme. “Hitler’s regime took away guns from the people in Germany and then he herded all of those who did not like it into boxcars and shipped them to concentration camps."
It's illogical. How many Jews had guns anyway? And what good would they have done? The French & Polish military had guns - and tanks and planes. The idea that an armed citizenry can resist the full military might of the state is absurd.
Kevin McCullough, a conservative shill, encapsulates much of the gun zealot's scare tactics in one paragraph. He demeans the student organizers by understating their education. He trots out the rich, far-left boogeymen. He gratuitously throws in socialism. And he promotes the gun grab nonsense.
Even though they have little more than a junior high level of education under their belt. The political left, driven by a leftist media and financed by uber-rich and hard-left celebrities are willing to use them and to continue to use them to advance their socialist utopia ideals. (One of the primary ideas of which has always included disarming the masses.)
The students never suggested a ban on guns. Nor did they demand a repeal of the second amendment. They asked for sensible regulations on firearms. And in that, they mirrored the majority of Americans including gun owners. Who are the adults in the conversation?