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Thursday, May 3, 2018
Wednesday, high school students across the United States walked out of class at 10:00 a.m. local time to protest what they say are excessive gun control laws in response to pro-gun-control events that took place in March and April, such as the March for Our Lives, and two student led walkouts on March 14 and April 20. According to the organizers, the event included hundreds of schools. It is named “Stand for the Second” after the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution which refers to the rights of the people to own guns but has been interpreted in several different ways since its enactment in 1791.
The event’s website reads “We believe, as did the founders, that a well-armed citizenry is necessary to the security of a free state. We reject the notion that liberty should be traded for security, for we know we will have neither.” The website refers to the Founding Fathers of the United States, an umbrella term for the cohort of men who fought in the U.S. Revolutionary War and drafted the country’s constitution in the late 1700s. The quote “those who trade liberty for security deserve neither” is attributed to Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, though according to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, he was at the time talking metaphorically about a tax dispute, not literally about military safety.
The event was organized by senior Will Riley, originally from New Mexico, now at Carlsbad High School in California. The conservative organization Tea Party Patriots also claims to have helped.
“I’m watching the news and I see they’re saying, ‘We have to do something about this. We have to enact some sort of gun control legislation because this is what the kids are asking for.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’m not asking for that,'” Riley told the press. “I look at my friends and I think ‘They’re not asking for that.'”
“I do think there are way too many gun control laws, especially in New York where I am,” 16-year-old Lane Cooper of Schoharie Central School District told the press. Participants in his group explained to bystanders that they believed that access to guns is necessary for citizens to defend themselves from the government should it exceed its rights.
“I believe that we have to show that kids of our generation aren’t all represented by those who have been in the media in the past for this issue,” said Dennis Fiorentinos of California High School in San Ramon, California. “I wanted to show that there are teenagers and kids out there that support the Second Amendment by saying that banning guns is not the answer.” The students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida who went on to organize the March for Our Lives movement have been the subject of both criticism and conspiracy theories that portray them as paid crisis actors, or fakes.
“It protects all of the other amendments,” said 16-year-old Mario Giordano of Ridgefield, New Jersey. “No other country has a law that says well-armed citizenry is necessary for a free state.” He went on to say he supported some measures, such as background checks for gun owners and keeping guns away being used by the mentally ill.
Students recited the Pledge of Allegiance and carried banners. The walkouts each lasted for 16 minutes. Event organizers said this was to establish that they were not asking as much as the anti-gun control marchers, whose walkouts had lasted 17 minutes. One survivor of the Stoneman Douglas shooting, Ryan Deitch, took exception to this on Twitter, saying , “This forgets to mention the 17 minutes were for each fallen Eagle at Stoneman Douglas. They may have forgotten, but America will not.”
Although a supporter of gun rights, Stoneman Douglas student Kyle Kushuv, who was present for the attack on his school, did not participate in the walkout: “I don’t believe it is the correct thing to do,” he said on Twitter. “Disrupting 1000s of classrooms around the country isn’t the answer,” he said on Twitter. “There’s a time and place for civil disobedience, I just don’t believe that time is now. Instead, let’s all #WalkUp!” #WalkUp! is a movement proposed by a man whose daughter died in the Parkland shooting. It says that students themselves can prevent school shootings by being kinder and more polite to their schools’ social outcasts.
The pro-gun-control March for Our Lives walkout, organized by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting was held on March 24 in Washington, D.C. and drew hundreds of thousands of participants, not including those in over 800 sister marches across the globe. According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the sister march in his city included 175,000. There were anti-gun-control protests that day as well.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It has been interpreted in many different ways since taking effect in 1791, with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights.