During the two-day White House conference on school safety, Andrew Pollack, the father of a child who was killed during the Florida school massacre last week, summed up the feelings of many: “How many schools, how many children need to get shot? I am not going to sleep until it is fixed!”
The question is, what is “it” that needs to be fixed? Is it the fact that authorities did see that Nikolas Cruz’s odd behavior could have led to trouble? Is it that once those authorities were alerted to a potential problem, they did nothing to intervene or avert the problem from breaking out into violence? Is it that Cruz was able to purchase a firearm legally even though he had a history of violent behavior? Is it “bump stocks,” which allow semi-automatic rifles to become rapid-fire weapons? Or is it that no one on the school grounds was able to return fire before Cruz obliterated the lives of 17 students and devastated the lives of many others before being neutralized?
To members of the mainstream media, there is only one solution: more restrictions on innocent, law-abiding gun owners who had nothing whatever to do with the Florida shooting.
For example, CNN held a “Stand Up” town hall event (shown) on February 21 with the aparent purpose of promoting the one single solution it has seen for years as the ultimate and final solution to gun violence: the removal of all firearms from their rightful owners. The network invited students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSDHS) to speak, but carefully weeded out questions or comments that opposed CNN’s narrative. For instance, CNN invited student Colton Haab to speak, but when the network learned that his comments presented an opposing viewppint, he was given a script.
Haab refused to participate in the fraud. Said Haab, “I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions,” adding, “CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted. I don’t think that … is going to get anything accomplished. [CNN refused to allow me to] ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have.”
Naturally, CNN, apparently being exposed in its attempt to redirect Haab away from questions and comments that didn’t fit the network’s narrative, denied everything: “There is absolutely no truth to this. CNN did not provide or script questions for anyone in last night’s town hall, nor have we ever.” CNN then offered the their reason for scripting Haab: “It became clear that Colton wanted to give an extensive speech and not just ask a question, which the town hall was not designed for.”
That so-called town hall seemed to be designed to present one side of a single issue on the question raised above: What is “it” that needs to be “fixed”?
Another MSDHS student, Brandon Minoff, also caught on to the scheme:
I wholeheartedly believe that the media is politicizing this tragedy. It seems that gun control laws is the major topic of conversation rather than focusing on the bigger issue of 17 innocent lives being taken at the hands of another human….
I know many people who are pro-gun and others who support gun control but it seems that the media is specifically targeting those in support of gun control to make it seem as if they are the majority, and the liberal news outlets are the ones that seem to make the bigger effort to speak to these people … I’m talking from experience….
All day Thursday, CNN was interviewing gun experts and specialists to brainwash the audience that gun control is a necessity. They even have an army of my classmates trying to persuade other students that guns are unnecessary and should be illegal.
Recruiting apparently is going well, as hundreds of students from MSDHS and other public schools were able to take a couple of days off and travel to the Florida State Capitol and to Washington, D.C., to protest the supposed lack of action on the issue. Just who was funding these excursions and how these groups just managed to coalesce organically are questions that remain open. But former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and Georgia’s GOP Congressman Jack Kingston each smelled a rat, as we pointed out yesterday. Clarke tweeted: “Media appearances and an activism campaign from students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School against gun violence had ‘George Soros’ fingerprints all over it,” while Kingston remarked, “It is implausible that high school students who survived a brutal massacre last week were capable of organizing nationwide rallies for gun control on their own.”
This sudden “eruption of student activism,” as the Wall Street Journal called it, is almost entirely focused on one aspect only: gun control. But there are other issues getting scant attention over solving the “it” question. Issues being shunted aside include allowing teachers the freedom and opportunity to carry concealed while on campus, permitting armed volunteers to roam those campuses (veterans, for example, or parents trained in self-defense), prescription drug involvement leading to or exacerbating existing mental-health problems, closer monitoring of “problem” people such as Cruz, and so forth.
But the liberal media’s focus is single-minded: punish those who had nothing to do with the Florida shooting by taking their legally owned guns away from them, by government force if necessary. Efforts at directing the conversation last week are, for them, just another step in that direction.
Photo of MSDHS student Cameron Kasky questioning Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) during CNN town hall meeting: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Sheriff Clarke: Are the Student Gun-control Protests George Soros Astroturf?
