It is my belief that this needs to be shared again and again until we adults and elders all hear and respond with fierce compassion and caring and passionate action that is in the highest good of our children and all children. These are the strong and courageous and heartbroken and vital voices of the youth who refuse to settle any longer for the broken world we have handed them through our ignorance, cowardice, greed, apathy, and active or passive collusion with the violence that is killing our children. No more! Enough is enough! May we all stand strongly and courageously with and for the children and youth who are demanding the profound change that is critical to creating a just and caring and peaceful world. We are all family. - Molly
By Emma Gonzalez
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.
Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to
be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and
political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having
debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three
debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the
shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right
now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing
interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the
very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past
four years alone.
I found out today there's a website shootingtracker.com.
Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA's
shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass
shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety,
and it hasn't had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has
had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here
we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can
be formulated into statistics for your convenience.
I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the
questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school
shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go
through other school shooter drills. When we've had our say with the government
-- and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying 'it is what it is,' but if
us students have learned anything, it's that if you don't study, you will fail.
And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so
it's time to start doing something.
We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not
because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but
because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just
like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That's going to be
Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it's going to be due to the
tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members
and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in
the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic
attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone,
hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.
There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. So many
signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad
and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must
always report such instances to authorities again and again. We did, time and
time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who
knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should
have not ostracized him, you didn't know this kid. OK, we did. We know that
they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we
need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue.
He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.
And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was
the student's fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the
first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories
for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away
from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking
about the FBI. I'm talking about the people he lived with. I'm talking about
the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.
If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face
that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and
maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to
happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.
You want to know something? It doesn't matter, because I already
know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in
the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out
to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you
don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of
gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And
we will be worthless to you.
To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame
on you.
Crowd chants, shame on you.
If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought
be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or
would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You
know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not
act like it. 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.
The people in the government who were voted into power are lying
to us. And us 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 guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.
They say a good guy with a gun stops a 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 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, register to vote. Contact your local
congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.
(Crowd chants) Throw them out.
Please go here for the transcript
and video of Emma's strong voice of truth: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html
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