Today's Must-Read: Tipping Point?

Maybe, just maybe, in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, we've reached a point where enough people are ready to say "Enough!" that we might be able to do something about it.

Let's start with this post from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

A gunman entered her high school on Valentine's Day and killed seventeen of her classmates. Wiping back tears, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzales held back nothing else in challenging President Trump, national politicians, and the National Rifle Association in a powerful speech to an anti-gun rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Saturday.

If there is one thing teenagers' eyes see better than adults', it is hypocrisy. Their tolerance for it is lower too.

Gonzales told the crowd:

In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

Grassley said after the Florida shootings, "We have not done a very good job of making sure that people that have mental reasons for not being able to handle a gun getting their name into the FBI files and we need to concentrate on that."

The blatant hypocrisy is staggering. And it's worth noting that Grassley took in $9,900 from the NRA in the 2016 election cycle alone. I can't find a total for Grassley, but he doesn't seem to be in the first rank like Richard Burr ($6,986,620), Roy Blunt ($4,551,146), Thom Tillis ($4,418,012), Cory Gardner ($3,879,064), or Marco Rubio ($3,303,355), none of whom think it's the right time to talk about gun control.

She's not the only one calling the politicians to account. Cameron Kasky, another student who survived, at CNN:

We can't ignore the issues of gun control that this tragedy raises. And so, I'm asking -- no, demanding -- we take action now.

Why? Because at the end of the day, the students at my school felt one shared experience -- our politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools.

But this time, my classmates and I are going to hold them to account. This time we are going to pressure them to take action. This time we are going to force them to spend more energy protecting human lives than unborn fetuses.

And they're organizing:

Student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting announced a “March for Our Lives” this morning calling for lawmakers to take substantive action on guns.

Emma Gonzalez, the student who gave an impassioned speech yesterday, told CNN’s Dana Bash, “We’re going to be facing this with trepidation and determination, and we have an incredible support system around us. We are going to be the difference.”

Cameron Kasky said right into the camera, “We are losing our lives while the adults are playing around.”

He said on March 24th, students “in every single major city” will be marching to send a message about how lives are literally on the line.

“This isn’t about the GOP, this isn’t about the Democrats,” he said. “This is about us creating a badge of shame for any politicians who are accepting money from the NRA and using us as collateral.”

There's video at the link which doesn't seem to be at CNN's YouTube channel and which I can't embed.

Maybe we need to start targeting those senators and representatives who are flouting the wishes of a large majority of Americans.

Sullivan's parting thought is worth repeating here:

In most reports on her speech, this early section gets left out:

I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

Contrast that with the comments of the conservative Australian rancher Jon Oliver spoke with in 2013. He did not want to part with his weapons when the government banned them after the Port Arthur massacre, "But ... I felt as if I had a bit of a duty to the rest of our society."

What he said.

And a thought, to all those congresscritters and senators who never think it's time to talk about gun control, and/or that it should be easier to buy guns:

Why is the Capitol a gun-free zone?