By: James Lamborn
With her Army-green jacket adorned with a Cuban flag patch, nobody needed to look too closely to understand what Emma González was representing during her anti-gun speech at the “March for Our Lives” protest.
Obviously proud of her Cuban heritage, it’s doubtful the new “it girl” of the gun control movement was unaware when she chose her get-up that Fidel Castro often wore a similar outfit. The odds are that González was fully aware of the dictator’s gun control policy while she sewed the Cuban flag onto her jacket. It’s also safe to assume that, like many millennials today who walk around wearing Che Guevara shirts (sold for $29.99 at Hot Topic, a capitalist retailer), that her opinion of communists, such as Fidel, is less than contemptuous.
The gross irony is that González was sporting the Fidel look while speaking at an anti-mass shooting event. Some estimates place the number of dissenters Castro sent to the firing squad at 40,000 people. Of course, as a young person grows in age, experience, and maturity, her beliefs and outlooks tend to change – at least they should – so I do not want to be unduly harsh to young Ms. González; she still has time to grow-up mentally and emotionally.
The important truth remains, however, that the nightmare at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is not what made Emma González a political activist. González, who is a leader of her school’s chapter of the “Gay-Straight Alliance,” already was one well before she survived the shooting, as were the handful of other anti-gun students hand-picked to appear on national television afterward.
It is uncertain who indoctrinated González, or at what age, but the odds are that it began early – and in government schools. Given her age and the era she grew up in (González was 8-9 years old when Obama became president), her world view has been cultivated by a culture filled, from kindergarten to college, largely with unionized, activist, indoctrinating teachers, principals, and superintendents.
Despite the famous faces of the current push for gun control being those of young people – 18-year-old David Hogg has emerged as another rising star – the movement was orchestrated and funded by much older, professional activists. It is no accident that the much-anticipated “student movement” labeled “March for Our Lives” consisted primarily of people over the age of 18. The average protester was 49 years old, and only 10 percent of the protestors were under the age of 18!
More than a thousand students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did not attend the March for Our Lives protest. There is no evidence González represented the majority of her peers. What this protest was about was much more than America’s youth calling for “common-sense gun control.” The whole movement represents what most nationally televised protests have represented since the 1960s: not gun control, but people control. Control over what people say, what people eat, what people spend, what people earn, what people drive, what people do, what people think.
These bullies relentlessly chastise dissenters who do not agree with them on sociopolitical issues. (Hogg labeled the NRA and the organization’s supporters “child murderers.”) They curse and scream at anyone who challenges their radical, left-wing notions, and in some cases go so far as to use the law to silence their opposition through suit.
Anyone who values his or her American freedoms should be deeply alarmed by what the March for Our Lives protests have revealed. The radical viewpoints of children like González and Hogg were not adopted in a vacuum; they were nurtured by calculating adults who are aware of world history, and who know that without laws protecting our basic human rights (yes, even “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”), it is inevitable that tyranny will take over. The scariest part is that the adults who exploit these children, never missing an opportunity to use tragedy to their advantage by manipulating people’s emotions, know exactly what they’re doing.
What are we free-thinking liberty lovers to do about the rampant misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the Second Amendment?
We must educate ourselves and our children. We must replace the irrational fear and ignorance of firearms, so prevalent in American youth, with knowledge. We must teach them gun control doesn’t work, and instill in them the value of our constitutional rights and a healthy fear of the terrible things that can and will befall us if we were ever to lose them. (Remember, as GPM reported, “The Weimar government implemented [gun control] laws that the Nazis would later use to oppress the German people, namely, German Jews.”)
We must learn from this national gun hysteria, curb it now, and stop communism in its tracks by embracing guns, reason, and virtue.
James Lamborn is an author and sales consultant, writing from Seattle, Washington. Contact him at [email protected].
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Gunpowder Magazine.
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