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The bold revenge of Generation Z
“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner
Op-Ed Commentary
Last week, I wrote a column saying it was up to the millennials in gun-crazed Amerika to save themselves because as long as the National Rifle Association (NRA) retains power there will never be a majority of American politicians that favour gun control.
Well, guess what? The earth has moved!
Thanks to the Generation Z students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and a virtual tsunami of teen students across the country, American politicians, especially of the older, white, evangelical, Republican variety, are quaking in their boots because David – not armed with a gun – but with a metaphorical sling-shot is about to slay the mighty NRA Goliath.
AMEN to that! And believe me, this over 60-year-old man is not ashamed to say he feels a lump rising in his throat when he says it.
Hell, I’m a former gun-owner too. Raised in the Kootenays by my hunter father, a wonderful man and a wonderful hunter, who kept our larder full of wild meat in my youth. It’s meat that I still enjoy eating today thanks to some hunting friends. But after the horrific school slaughter at Columbine, which came after the similarly, sickening slaughter of 14 female post-secondary students at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, I gave Dad’s hunting rifles away. As much as I loved my father, I couldn’t bear to look at those guns anymore. Every time I did, I saw that deadly school video of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shooting up the classrooms and hallways of Columbine to be followed by the even more grotesque tragedy of the 20 elementary students and six teachers savagely shot at Sandy Hook Elementary.
It’s hard to avoid tearing up like former President Obama did when he addressed the nation about the killing of the innocents in the bloody Sandy Hook carnage. Many said then if that tragedy didn’t bring gun control to the most heavily armed nation in the world, nothing would.
And they were right!
Gun killings, often with automatic, machine gun-like weapons, continues unabated in schools, streets and public stadiums where people gather to hear music but instead hear the staccato bursts of bullets from AR-15 automatic weapons or rifles equipped with “bump stocks” to make them shoot like machine guns. In ‘Heart of Darkness,’ Kurtz cries “the horror, the horror” when he sees colonialists being killed. Well, that horror is happening with numbing regularity in NRA Land today. It happens at music concerts. elementary school classrooms and in high school hallways where gangly teens are just beginning to make the exhilarating flush to adulthood. But it’s an experience many of them are tragically missing as politicians utter sanctimonious platitudes and mumble empty prayers. Wasn’t it Dante who said there’s a special place in hell for hypocrites?
Forgive me, but just hearing President Trump say school shootings are a “mental health problem” and not a gun issue makes me want to vomit. And his callous claim that the answer is to arm teachers themselves with automatic weapons, resulting in more bullets flying in class rooms, is not even worthy of an imbecile. Yes, there’s a mental health problem in the U.S. and it resides in the White House.
So, what now?
One can only hope that the rage and fury expressed by the students of Marjory Stoneman will spread like wildfire across the land and result in thousands marching on Washington to purge the hallowed halls of Congress of every politician without the courage and integrity to stand up to the gun lobby. And I’d advise the same be done at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia. If you need a gun to express your manhood and courage, you’re a coward and you were never a “man” to begin with.
And finally, I’d ask you to pray for the families of the slain children killed in school shootings the past decade or two. Their grief must be overwhelming. They didn’t deserve a tragedy like this.
And neither did their children.
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and former hunter, who still believes the U.S. is a great nation and its gun sickness can be overcome.