Guns / Firearms

Everything Wrong With The Parkland Kids And Why You Should Support Them Anyway

Don't let the symbolism overtake reality. Because symbols have a nasty habit of being twisted.

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Tragedy transformed a handful of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students into the faces of a national conversation about gun violence. They’ve graced glossy covers, earned a 60 Minutes profile, and kept the discussion about mass shootings alive far, far longer than it’s been before.

They’ve also managed to get under the skin of a lot of the right people. A quick perusal of Twitter reveals the deeply held commitment among the wingnuts (or perhaps Russian bots… let’s call them wingbots to cover our bases) that David Hogg wasn’t even in school the day of the shootings — a lie that even the journalistically bankrupt Red State backed away from — or that Emma Gonzalez bullied the shooter — another laughably false claim.

But it’s time to stop lionizing these students.

To be clear, they deserve every bit of credit for organizing and pushing this issue. They are leaders forging steady progress in a movement that routinely falters whenever it picks up even a little steam. On the other hand, the coverage is spiraling away from the grounded reality of the students’ work and into the symbolic. That’s the double-edged sword of the media: it can deploy personal narratives to attract unparalleled attention, but it can just as easily pass those narratives into mythology, creating symbols ripe for cooptation by destructive forces beyond these students’ control.

In other words, be very wary of the symbolic “idea” of the students.

For example, what makes an image like this Time Magazine cover so striking? What does “Enough” even mean in this context? Unfortunately, it’s a troubling play on the idea that lax gun regulations are a problem that has finally “invaded” a suburban school that “should” be a safe space. The image draws its power from the idea that it’s now “enough” when it hits mostly white, mostly well-off kids (even if it’s already hit this population before). The uncomfortable flipside that makes that image work is the implication that gun violence in mostly minority, mostly lower income areas never reach the point of “enough.” It’s a powerful image. It can also be a problematic image.

To his credit, David Hogg has tried to flag the media fixation on this whiteness, using the media’s interest in his own story to point out that no one is talking to the school’s black students. By and large, the media hasn’t taken Hogg up on this invitation. Here, Hogg the conscientious advocate is in tension with Hogg the media personality — an entity that he cannot fully control. His comments about his fellow black students get passing mention while his owning of Laura Ingraham spawns a thousand follow-ups. He can control his voice, but the megaphone’s controls are just outside his reach.

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Secondly, the discussion of school shootings veers dangerously into conflating the school-to-prison pipeline with actual safety. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Eagle Eye’s editorial board — a distinct group of students — published their suggestions for preventing school shootings, and one suggestion stood out from the rest:

Increase funding for school security… We believe that schools should be given sufficient funds for school security and resource officers to protect and secure the entire campus.

Uh oh. This is exactly the intellectual dead end America hit post-Columbine, when funding for on-campus police skyrocketed. Yet despite all that money, these officers have yet to stop any school shootings — consider the now-infamous account of MSD’s resident cop refusing to act — but they have violently harassed and abused minority students.

But when police officers are stationed in schools, some studies show it increases the likelihood that students will be criminalized for adolescent misbehavior by way of school-based arrests or referrals to outside law enforcement. These experiences can have lasting consequences for children.

One 2009 study showed that schools with cops had more arrests for low-level offenses like disorderly conduct than schools without them. Nance’s research has found that schools with police had more referrals to local law enforcement for things like alcohol possession, vandalism and fights without a weapon.

Having cops in school may also increase the possibility for police brutality. While NASRO helps provide specific training for school-based police officers working with kids, in many places, this training isn’t required. A previous HuffPost investigation found that between 2011 and 2016, there were at least 87 incidents of school police using stun guns on kids for a range of behaviors.

What about that Maryland school shooting and the hero school resource officer the NRA touted a few weeks back? Yeah… that didn’t happen according to the official investigation into the incident. The deputy did fire on the student, but some time after the student had shot his seemingly designated target and while the student was already in the process of shooting himself in the head.

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Finally, there’s the money factor. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor, is a staunch advocate of gun regulation and his non-profit endeavor has latched onto the Parkland story like a Kraken. Unfortunately, Bloomberg’s vision of gun control rests heavily on robust gun possession laws, and just like those marijuana possession laws he argues so hard to maintain, the real crux of Bloomberg’s project rests on expanding the litany of pretexts for warrantless police searches.

There are a lot of ways to regulate firearms in America. Bloomberg wants to control the end user and populate jails, uncritically leveraging the racial disparities that exist at every level of the criminal justice system. Lax though they may be, current gun regulations already land black people in jail at wildly disproportionate rates, while white offenders are offered a myriad of ways to plead out to avoid enhancements and mandatory minimums. An alternative approach would focus on the supply side and propose bans on the manufacture of assault rifles for private use or regulate high capacity magazines or — to only half-jokingly cite Chris Rock — tax the hell out of bullets, with little to no direct impact on individuals. The gap between these conflicting gun control strategies radically impacts how gun regulation will play out, and who bears the burden.

So there are some sizable warts developing on this movement. And yet, it’s not yet time to abandon the — very loosely defined — cause yet. It’s tragically possible (some may even argue likely) that we’ll all have to turn our backs on this whole endeavor when the energy these kids have kicked up transforms into concrete policy proposals from “adults” like Bloomberg, but that juncture still seems just over the horizon.

Whatever happened to a little useful skepticism? It’s not impossible to support a movement while remaining internally critical of its shortcomings. There is, of course, a time when you need to draw a line in the sand and be the contrarian resisting an otherwise admirable cause because there’s something rotten at its core. It just doesn’t feel like this has reached that point.

Indeed, it’s that looming risk of cooptation, of becoming another avenue for failed and disastrous policies, that underscores just how much of a floating signifier this remains at this moment. If anything, the bigger this coalition can become before specific proposals materialize, the more effectively it shifts the discussion — in an Overton Window sense — by setting the grounds of the debate around internal conflicts over policy rather than continuing to fight straw arguments over mythical government figures “coming for your guns.”

There’s a vague, loosely defined energy around gun regulation now and everyone wants a piece of it. Until that calcifies into something specific, there’s an opportunity to lean into it.

For now.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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