Will America Choose Its Children Over Guns?<br />They are asking in what kind of country are children sent off to school with bulletproof book bags strapped to their backs — capable,<br />one manufacturer, Bullet Blocker, says, of “stopping a .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, 9mm, .45 caliber hollow point ammunition and more.”<br />“I was born 13 months after Columbine,” a 12th grader named Faith Ward said on Monday, referring to<br />the school massacre in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, the dawn of the modern wave of school shootings.<br />Ms. Ward spoke to a television reporter at an anti-gun demonstration outside her school in Plantation, Fla. “This is all I have ever known,” she said, “this culture of being gunned down for no reason,<br />and this culture of people saying, ‘Oh, let’s send thoughts and prayers’ for three days, and then moving on.<br />Young people, initially reviled by establishment forces as unwashed, longhaired traitors, energized an antiwar movement<br />that swept the country and, even if it took years, ultimately ended America’s misguided adventure in Southeast Asia.<br />Such a program should also include reinstating a nationwide ban on assault weapons — a state measure died in the Florida Legislature Tuesday —<br />and ending an absurd prohibition against using federal public health funds to study gun violence<br />They’ve had enough of empty expressions of sympathy in the wake of the sort of atrocities they’ve grown<br />up with, like last week’s mass shooting that took 17 lives at a high school in Parkland, Fla.<br />A tighter federal system of background checks is a start, to better monitor would-be<br />gun buyers with mental illness, for example, or histories of gun violence.
