Unsurprisingly, the “Parkland Protesters” were co-opted by the anti-Second Amendment left, and everyone from the media to politicians on both sides of the aisle to former Supreme Court justices has been falling over themselves to support “gun control” in their name.
Last month, Kemberlee blogged about how the “March for Our Lives” had been taken over by a variety of the usual leftist SJW agitators and demagogues.
Noting that Planned Parenthood, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Move On, the Women’s March, and the American Federation of Teachers were all involved in promoting, organizing, and funding the march, Kemberlee concludes:
Make no mistake, The March For Our Lives is not spontaneous, nor is it For The Children™ (Planned Parenthood’s involvement says at least that much). Left-wing agitators, social justice warriors, and anti-second amendment folks are in the worst and most literal sense using traumatized kids as tools to garner political capital.
Indeed, as neo-neocon blogged, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens penned an op-ed citing the “schoolchildren” who engaged in the march as a great reason for “getting rid” of the Second Amendment.
Stevens wrote, “rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday.”
The narrative goes like this: Schoolchildren are spontaneously and independently rallying to change America’s gun laws; they are going to take action because they can’t count on adults in Congress. They’re just fed up, as the first student speaker stated at Saturday’s DC rally: “‘Welcome to the revolution . . . . My generation has spent our entire lives seeing mass shooting after mass shooting,’ and that needs to end now.”
It turns out, however, that only 10% of the March for Our Lives participants were teens. According to the Washington Post, for those over the age of 18, the average age was 49.
However, the young faces of the advocates have created an assumption that “youth” and “students” are the core of the movement. My research tells a different story about who participated in the March for Our Lives — and it is more complicated and less well-packaged for prime time.. . . . Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March for Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. Further, participants were highly educated; 72 percent had a BA or higher.
Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.
Interestingly, we do have a movement in the United States in which a far larger percentage of high school and college students engage each year: the March for Life.
The March for Life rally is an annual event that even the progressive Daily Beast acknowledges “has become something of a magnet for college and high school groups.” This is all-but-ignored by the media and certainly never held up by the left as a reason to overturn Roe v. Wade, let alone repeal a Constitutional amendment.
Crowd size estimates are difficult, and March for Life attendance varies each year. However, the March for Life has attracted larger crowds each year (excepting 2016 when a blizzard in DC affected attendance): estimates for 2012 show that 400,000 attended, in 2013, an estimated 650,000 attended.
Crowd size isn’t the narrative, though some media outlets attempted to make it a part of the narrative with outrageous claims about “March for Our Lives” attendance.
When was the last time you saw a CNN town hall that focused on the “schoolchildren” who oppose abortion and support life? When was the last time you saw a group of pro-life high school students hailed as the voice of their generation, a voice we should all listen to without question? When was the last time a pro-life student became so well-known that he or she appeared on morning, daytime, and evening talk shows and was the 24/7 topic of cable news outlets?
According to the leftist anti-Second Amendment crowd, we need to take seriously the demands of teenagers . . . unless the issue is abortion. As usual, the issue is not “the children,” the issue is forwarding an anti-American agenda and using “the children” as pawns.
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