Headline Feb 26, 2018/ ''' FLORIDA *-STUDENTS-* FLARES '''

''' FLORIDA *-STUDENTS-* FLARES '''

OVER 100,000 AMERICANS ARE SHOT ANNUALLY by fellow Americans, killing some 40,000 of them.

No body is immune. Even school children are not immune.

This year alone, there has been an average of three shooting per week on school grounds.

THE REAL REASON - that mass shootings aren't leading to legislative action is that the nation has a chasm between two sweeping moral visions:

One Pro-Gun and one Anti-Gun, that is now just too wide to be easily bridged by incrementalism.

The anti-gun moral vision regards America's relationship to gun ownership as a kind of  collective moral madness, a love affair with violence, a terrible sickness unto death.

The pro-gun moral vision, meanwhile, links arms and the citizen, treating self-defense as an essential  civic good, a means of maintaining Americans as free people rather than {or prisoners} of the state.

The pro-gun vision is linked, of course, to practical concerns - support for gun ownership is higher in rural areas where the police are far away.

But it's essentially a moral political picture in which the fullness of citizen includes the capacity to protect and defend, to step in when the state fails and resist when it imposes illegitimately.

Here then is a master excerpt from *A Students Message to Politicians About the Florida Massacre.''

IN FEBRUARY 2017, just one year ago, President Trump and American Lawmakers repealed an  Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of forearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

Thus, they made it easier for tragedies to occur.

Emma ended her speech saying in a voice almost trembling with anger:

''The people in the government who were voted into power are just lying to us. And us students/kids  seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.

Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self -involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS.

Politicians who sit in their gilded  House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS.

They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.

They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops bad guy with a gun.

We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars.

We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred.

We call BS. That us kids/students don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works.

We call BS. If you agree to register to vote, contact your local congressperson................. *Give them a piece of your mind*.

Emma and her fellow students showed to have more guts than a meretricious Congress.

So, to sum, all kinds of debate will rage in the near future. No easy solutions are on the horizon.

Perhaps one reasonable way forward for America would be, for instance, instead of debating gun regulations that would apply to every gun owner, we could consider limits that are imposed on youth and removed with age.......

After all, the fullness of adult citizenship is not bestowed at once :

Driving precedes voting precedes drinking, and the right to stand for certain offices is granted only in your thirties.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the  Free World. See Ya all on !WOW! - the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Munitions & Massacres '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless