“These teenagers aren’t emotionally mature enough to speak on the gun issue.”
This has been the gun-loving lobby’s party line, ever since the students around this country were catalyzed into activism following the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Since that moment, the repeated assertion by GOP politicians, partisan pundits, and NRA mouthpieces, is that somehow these teenagers lack the maturity and intelligence to grasp the complexities of the issues, or to comprehend the subtleties at play, or to speak into the topic with any authority.
Are we talking about the same ‘”emotionally immature” teenagers who watched their best friends and beloved teachers slaughtered, and in a matter of hours spoke with eloquence and clarity before the watching world?
Do they mean the same “emotionally immature” young people who have coordinated school walkouts, social media awareness movements, local protests, and a coming national display of solidarity called MarchForOurlives?
Are they referring to the “emotionally immature” teenagers who stood on a stage at the CNN Town Hall, under the glare of the lights and cameras and the eyes of millions—and without flinching stared down a group of professional liars who stammered and looked as though they would wet themselves?
Do these folks mean the “emotionally immature” teenagers who have almost singlehandedly stripped the NRA of dozens of corporate sponsors, through an organized, complex grassroots social media campaign they spearheaded?
Are they questioning the emotional maturity of the middle and high school students who planned and lead thoughtful, impassioned memorial services for their fellow students throughout the country, just a few days after the Parkland shooting?
Are these the young people whose capabilities and intelligence they’re concerned with? I must be missing something.
Any attempt to dismiss high school students for their alleged lack of maturity is fully laughable, coming from those supporting a President with a 5th grade vocabulary, an elementary school attention span, an infantile capacity for critical thinking, and a prehistoric understanding of the world.
It’s even more dissonant and fraudulent, for these adults to question the emotional capacity of young people to talk about weapons designed for brutal and rapid violence—while arguing they are capable enough to own and use them.
I wonder what kind of “emotional maturity” these custodians of maturity are proponents of:
Dead-hearted, Dana Loesch, grandstanding on the CPAC stage while saying that “crying white mothers are ratings gold?”
Unhinged, NRA President Wayne LaPierre, screaming loudly about the people coming for their guns, while claiming God himself wants everyone to have them?
Senator Ted Cruz, grinning like a Cheshire Cat, while filming a video cooking bacon with a high-powered machine gun?
Breitbart flunky Ben Shapiro, FoxNews disciple Laura Ingraham, or ammosexual NRA cheerleader, Ted Nugent—whose responses to grieving families regularly reside somewhere between indifference and contempt?
A President whose solution to help underpaid, under resourced, overworked teachers—is to put a gun in their hands and ask them to do what trained officers could not do in Parkland, what a base full of soldiers in Fort Hood couldn’t do in 2009, what a small army of Secret Service men and women couldn’t do for President Reagan in 1981—bring down a bad guy with a gun in a moment of unthinkable chaos?
And who are these supposed adult guardians of our national emotional maturity?
The ones who’ve spent the past week trolling these teenage survivors and their families on Twitter, publicly maligning them in press conferences, rolling their eyes at their grief on talk shows, talking smack about them from the CPAC stage?
The ones who’ve ramped up their “pry them from my cold dead hands” rhetoric, even while funerals for other teenagers are taking place?
Are these the emotionally mature grown-ups: still trying to say with a straight face that the only answer to the proliferation of guns and our exponentially higher rate of mass murders using those guns—is more guns?
I question their qualifications to dismiss anyone’s emotional state.
No, the problem is not that these young people aren’t capable of comprehending the gravity of the situation. They’ve buried their best friends and peers, and they see how commonplace these murders are here, and they know the politicians have nothing to offer but their dusty “thoughts and prayers.”
The problem isn’t that they don’t understand the complicated political issues at work. They see the way cowards hide behind a bastardization of the 2nd Amendment and how beholden Republicans are to the gun lobby, and how frequently this President leverages the fear of the white people he so easily convinces are in imminent danger.
The problem isn’t that these teenagers don’t have the facts straight. They know the statistics and the death rates accurately. They know how much money GOP leaders have received from the NRA. They call out FoxNews for their allergic reaction to the truth. They dismantle every bit of fake news and every Tweet lie brandished by gun lovers desperate to change the narrative.
No, the problem is not really that these adults think these young people aren’t capable of speaking with authority or sustaining their attention. It’s that these adults know they can—and they are rightly terrified.
They realize that these bold, wise, passionate, pissed off teenagers are the greatest threat they’ve ever faced—and they are appropriately losing their collective shit.
The young people who have the microphone right now are so emotionally mature, that they see how inhuman it is for adults to have grown so used to mass memorials for their peers that they no longer feel them.
They’re emotionally mature enough to still be outraged at regular, preventable executions that their political leaders profit from.
They’re emotionally mature enough to see that lack of empathy on display by these supposedly leaders is a sign of a corporate heart sickness.
They’re emotionally mature enough to see that we have a gun problem, and that it is killing our future doctors and artists and police officers and teachers.
No, these young people know exactly what’s happening here.
They see everything with piercing clarity.
They fully grasp the urgency of the moment.
They’re not going to allow anyone to normalize their deaths.
They’re not going to be shouted down or ignored or rendered invisible by those who make a living from producing scared people and selling them both the lie that guns will make them safer—and the guns themselves.
These “emotionally immature” teenagers are speaking eloquently and with authority, and they are doing something else.
They are saving the soul of this country.
And I’m grateful to them.
-John Pavlovitz
My take: I mean really you almost got to laugh at how pathetic the conservative reaction was and is to these young high school students. The right-wing, the religious right, whatever, there they are slamming these that are trying to reconcile the worst of tragedies. What you have seen is what is truly at the heart of the extremist right and I can say truly because it was all measured. Do you understand...pathetic criticism measured out carefully over days and weeks from different conservative sources. That is their heart and if they could rule fully over you, you know what you would get for disagreeing, dissenting? You would get a world almost analogous to their feared world of an anti-christ and yet they will treat these young people the way they fear being treated.
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