The “other side” of the debate on gun control among high school students began being heard, and noticed, in earnest Wednesday morning as “Stand for the Second” demonstrations began unfolding from coast to coast.
For example, about 150 students at Blue Valley Southwest High School in Overland Park, Kansas walked out of class at 10 a.m. Central time, WDAF News reported. The local Fox News affiliate in Kansas City estimated about ten percent of the school’s students were involved in the 16-minute walkout.
Likewise, students at Grand Ledge High School in Grand Ledge, Mich., also walked out of class, according to the Lansing State Journal. An estimated 100 students participated, the newspaper said. Event organizer Zach Bell told the newspaper that this was not about countering the “March For Our Lives” protests earlier this spring, but to show that not all teens support gun control.
The nationwide pro-Second Amendment effort was started by Carlsbad, N.M. high school senior Will Riley, who spoke last month to Conservative Firing Line via telephone. The school walkout was designed to give pro-rights students a voice after weeks of publicity for anti-gun high school students.
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Writing recently in the Carlsbad Current Argus, Riley had this to say:
“For the past month, Americans have been subjected to wall-to-wall cable news coverage of a well-orchestrated campaign to dismantle the Second Amendment. This campaign, organized and funded by national gun control groups, has exploited a handful of grieving teens from the Parkland, Florida high school shooting tragedy.
“As a high school senior in Carlsbad who supports gun rights, I am disgusted by how these students and their adult handlers are trying to define my generation. My generation is not anti-Second Amendment. My generation does not agree with retired Justice John Paul Stevens that the Second Amendment should be repealed. In fact, millennials are more pro-gun than our parents are. It’s time the media starts hearing from the millions of young Americans who respect the Constitution and recognize that the Second Amendment is fundamental to our protection and safety, as both individuals, and as a nation.”
While the New York Daily News looked at this student effort in the East, the San Jose Mercury News noted that students from “at least four Bay Area high schools” were going to participate.
By no small coincidence, the “Stand for the Second” demonstrations occurred less than 48 hours before the opening of the 2018 National Rifle Association convention in Dallas, Texas. That event will attract tens of thousands of NRA members to the Kay Bailey Hutchison convention center in downtown Dallas for a weekend of meetings and programs that includes appearances on Friday of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, no doubt hoping to stress the urgency of this fall’s mid-term elections. Democrat Nancy Pelosi has already made it clear that if her party regains control on Capitol Hill, gun control will be high on their agenda.
But by November, a fair number of pro-rights teens will be able to vote, providing a counter to threats by anti-gun high schoolers to cast ballots for anti-gun politicians.
One student at the Overland Park high school event told WDAF that gun control won’t stop violent acts.
“You take away guns, someone is going to get in their truck and drive on the sidewalk and run over hundreds of people,” said Blue Valley Southwest sophomore Jack Morrison. “The only way we can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It’s the only way it can be done. You are not going to ask them please and thank you, very nicely, and say please don’t shoot up the school.”
