BY HANK REICHMAN

No doubt like every other reader of this blog I’ve been awestruck and inspired by the response of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to the horrific mass shooting that struck down 17 of their classmates.  They have spoken out boldly, demonstrated visibly and loudly, and organized skillfully,  Their work has inspired and gained support from other students nationwide, and from teachers, parents and, basically, everyone but the insane diehards of the Trump administration, the NRA and the GOP.  If you haven’t yet seen last night’s extraordinary CNN town hall, where these young women and men took on Sen. Marco Rubio and the NRA’s odious million-dollar flack, Dana Loesch, go watch it right now.  It’s spellbinding!   Journalist Vann Newkirk described the broadcast’s potential impact:

Students across Florida and other places in the country are marching, and there appears to be an ongoing political awakening among youth about the issue of gun violence.  Students from Stoneman Douglas are finding their footing as political leaders in their own right, forced into the fire by tragedy, and have now proven effective in meeting the strongest arguments of their policy opponents, and in wielding the power of public opinion on their side.  If there is significant movement on gun-control reforms in the future, it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that the country will look back on Wednesday’s town hall as a paradigm-shifting moment that might have finally moved the debate.

As I wrote on Twitter, “People who trash our public education system as a failure need to explain how this system has produced such smart, articulate, poised, and powerful kids like these amazing South Florida high school students, the nation’s leaders today.”

The demands of the students are clear, sensible, and achievable.  They want a ban on assault weapons, universal background checks, and restrictions on access to weapons for the mentally ill, as well as those with histories of violence.  We academics might add an end to the Dickey amendment, which bars the Centers for Disease Control from studying the public health implications of gun violence.  That amendment, promoted by the NRA, eventually lost the support of its own sponsor, Congressman Jay Dickey.  If you want to know why the NRA pushed it so hard, read this piece from a radiologist at the hospital where the Parkland victims were sent.   And, of course, we need to demand an end to the cynically idiotic “campus carry” legislation that threatens to turn college campuses into the kinds of armed camps that Trump and the NRA now want to establish in the nation’s K-12 schools.

By contrast, Trump, the NRA and their craven GOP enablers propose what has become their new mantra: we need more guns, not fewer.  Specifically, they now propose arming teachers and “hardening” schools into fortresses, more akin to prisons than places of learning.  Vann Newkirk again, in a different essay:

President Trump has led the push for arming teachers for some time now.  He has repeatedly attacked gun-free zones in schools, arguing at an October 2015 presidential debate that such spaces provide “target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill.”  He’s kept up that critique as president in the wake of the Parkland shooting.  While attempting to clarify or correct news reports suggesting that he wanted to arm teachers, he tweeted about his desire to arm teachers, endorsing giving “concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience – only the best.”  He also tweeted that “a ‘gun free’ school is a magnet for bad people.”

But Trump is merely the vanguard in a deepening movement to arm educators in order to stop school shootings.  Bills across the country have been proposed to allow concealed handguns in schools, some provisions already exist for postsecondary campuses, and there are initiatives to train teachers in the use of weapons.  Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in an interview last week that states “clearly have the opportunity and the option” to arm teachers.  On Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre echoed that sentiment, saying, “we must immediately harden our schools.” . . .

Many other districts are already well beyond “hardened.”  Los Angeles school police procured grenade launchers, rifles, and an armored personnel carrier through a federal surplus program.  Police in Compton, California, are allowed to wear AR-15 rifles, and a Colorado district began distributing them in 2016.  There are now plenty school districts across America with armed school police officers, complete with metal detectors, body armor, and K-9 units.  Even the patently outlandish suggestion of Newsmax host Wayne Root to provide schools with armed drones isn’t so far from reality.   Schools already have drones, though not (yet) armed.

As Vox’s Jane Coaston argued, these suggestions mostly amount to security theater, and there is little data suggesting that armed school officials have a meaningful impact on student safety.  Even metal detectors haven’t really helped reduce violence, and that’s against both the steady stream of more mundane events of gun violence that plague some schools and the annual massacres.

Logically, even as Trump seemed to acknowledge in his backtracking, the idea of arming teachers is suspect.  The “good guy with a gun” theory underpinning the movement has never had any real credibility beyond a few choice anecdotes, and the training required to make armed teachers anything more than a liability would be onerous.  Teachers already work long hours for relatively little pay, and many school districts have dismissed the idea as simply impractical.

Josh Marshall noted that the “more guns” theory is simply “an insane idea that no country has ever considered.  Of course no country – not in the midst of endemic civil violence or civil war – has ever tried having totally unrestricted access to any number of firearms and any amount of ammunition either.  We’re already in uncharted territory.”  Marshall traces the genealogy of the idea that more guns reduce violence to the crackpot work of “scholar” John Lott.  But he explains the idea’s growing popularity in the gun lobby by drawing a parallel to the ever intensifying and increasingly racist defense of slavery as an allegedly “positive” good by the South to counter growing opposition to the slave system in the North in the decade before the Civil War.  Marshall concludes that

as long as you recognize the basic reality that guns are dangerous, fighting even the most minimal kinds of restrictions is inherently difficult.  You need to change the game.  You need a theory that is coherent and in line with your goal.  Lott’s theory created a logic for that.  The problem with massacres isn’t too many guns. It’s too few guns.  Guns aren’t the problem.  They’re the answer.  It was the NRA’s ‘positive good’ argument, comparable to the one pro-slavery intellectuals devised in the 1850s.  It’s the origin of virtually every argument the NRA makes today, from arming teachers to the “good guy with a gun”, to the need for permissive concealed carry nationwide.

This comparison with the history of slavery raises an important point too often, I fear, ignored in the current discussion.  While I suspect most of the students at Stoneman Douglas are middle class, it is clear that the student demonstrators who flooded Tallahassee this week were highly diverse.  Nevertheless, the media focused attention mainly on a relatively limited group of largely white student representatives.  It is therefore no slight to these students to ask whether they would have received as much attention if their high school had been situated in an inner-city neighborhood and had the students been largely Black or Hispanic.  Just about a year ago Chris Hayes on MSNBC brought together a smaller, but similar Town Hall with largely African-American participants to discuss the gun violence plaguing Chicago’s neighborhoods and schools.  It too was riveting and informative, but received far less attention.

Again, it takes nothing away from the courage and activism of the Parkland students to mention that Black and Hispanic youth have also stood up courageously and repeatedly against gun violence, including — and especially — the violence of some in law enforcement.  Just as it is difficult to imagine the activism of the largely white student antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s without the inspiration and energy created by those African-American students who sat-in at southern lunch counters and occupied buildings at places like Columbia in 1968 and Cornell in 1969, it is equally difficult, no, impossible, to imagine the activism at Parkland without the prior activism of Black youth and their multi-ethnic supporters in Ferguson, Missouri — three of whom have since died under mysterious circumstances — and in the Black Lives Matter movement.

So, as we cheer on and support the Parkland students, let’s not forget that the movement against gun violence and for gun control will only succeed if that movement recognizes that it’s not only middle class white high school students who are victims.  Those 17 lost lives in Parkland mattered, but so too do Black and Hispanic lives.  Minority youth suffer from gun violence at levels far beyond the overall mean.  In 1998, Black teenagers died of gun violence at a rate of 63 per 100,000 compared to the firearm homicide rate for non-Hispanic white male teenagers, which was just 3 per 100,000 in 1998.  The firearm homicide rate for Hispanic male teenagers that year was 29 per 100,000.  Black and Hispanic youth are also most often the ones who fall victim to the guns of the police.  Take Philando Castile.  The idiotic bigot Trump proposes we arm teachers and cafeteria workers, an idea whose time has passed before it was ever even thought.  Castile was a school cafeteria worker and he lawfully carried a firearm.  It cost him his life at the hands of the police. The silence of the NRA at the time was deafening.

I look forward to the planned March on Washington for gun control on March 24 and the national school walkout scheduled for April 20, anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado.  I hope the organizers will make common cause with the activists of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement.  I’m feeling optimistic that they will.