Students walked out of the classroom and away from school across the country Wednesday morning to protest gun violence exactly one month after a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Florida. It was planned as a nationwide demonstration and now it’s become fodder for a counter-protest.
A prominent national conservative student group, Young Americans for Freedom, promises to help organize a school assembly speech on gun-safety at any school that hosts a walkout.
“If schools use taxpayer-funded instructional time for political purposes to oppose a God-given freedom, it is only fair to provide an opportunity for an alternative educational lecture on gun safety and the Second Amendment,” said YAF National Chairman Grant Strobl in a statement.
What’s more, when that speech is over, YAF pledges to help students “petition their administrators to permit school personnel to arm themselves.”
That response might sound extreme. But Strobl, himself a student at the University of Michigan, sees the gun control protests as part of a leftist plot “to promote thoughtless policies that would dangerously erode the civil liberties upon which America is built.”
Cynics will observe that it’s exactly the sort of rhetoric that warms the heart (and opens the wallets) of elderly conservatives who fear that their country is poisoned by toxic liberalism. But it is also a significant development in the generational clash over the Second Amendment.
Conservatives have been rolled on campus in the last year. Caught mostly flat footed, they have struggled to confront the #Resistance during the Trump era. But if anyone has successfully stood athwart the quad over the last year, it’s been YAF. The group has hosted speakers, organized counter-protests, and generally offered the best response to rising liberal intolerance on campus.
Now YAF is getting into the gun debate and that means an escalation of the argument.