Calling on American youth to improve our national human condition

Keep marching, children- So, here it is, in 2023, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, Texas, walked out of schools protesting gun violence, and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little- and outright refuse- to stop it.

In the Virginia State Capitol Building, a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture of Barbara Johns. In 1951, she and other students led a strike to protest the conditions at their racially segregated school.

Echo history opinion by Cary Clack published in the San Antonio Express-News:  

But let's begin in 1951:  

It’s 1951 and R.R. Moton High School is a dump.

Pre-Brown v. Board of Education, the Black high school in Farmville, Virginia., is evidence that separate isn’t equal. 

All while the white high school across town, Farmville High, has all the resources needed for the education and comfort of its students, but on rainy days at Moton, students used umbrellas to keep dry in classrooms because of the porous roofs.

On April 23, 1951, the principal of Moton High receives a phone call that two of his students are going to be arrested at the bus station, so he leaves to go help them.

It’s a trick, and in his absence a note written in his name is sent to each of the classrooms calling for everyone to gather for a general assembly. Not knowing their reason for gathering, the 450 students and 25 teachers wait for their principal to explain.

But when the curtain opens, standing on stage isn’t the principal but Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, who had manipulated the principal’s absence so she could call on the student body to protest the second-class conditions of their school. 

Barbara Johns (1935-1991)

She asks, then demands, the teachers to leave the auditorium. Those who don’t are politely escorted out by students.

Moton High lacks, among other things, a cafeteria, lockers, a science lab, a gym, and an infirmary. Johns tells her fellow students that since their parents and other Black adults haven’t been listened to by the white establishment, it’s time for the Black students to act.

She called for a strike and leads all the students on a march out of school to the county courthouse and into the offices of the school superintendent. All day, the students demanded better schools.

When their demands are rebuffed, Johns reaches out to NAACP lawyers. In a mass rally, the lawyers warn Farmville’s Black community of the dangers involved with filing a lawsuit, but the students respond that there aren’t enough jails to hold them.

Over the next few months, Johns is harassed. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in her family’s front yard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Johns’ parents send her to Montgomery, Alabama., to live with her uncle, Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Now it’s 1963, and the man who succeeded Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., is leading a civil rights campaign in Birmingham to desegregate public facilities. King spends Easter weekend in jail. After his release, protests continue but the campaign isn’t capturing the nation’s attention.

That changed on May 2, when Black youth, more than 1,000 and some as young as 6, poured out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing freedom songs. Police used paddy wagons, squad cars and buses to ferry the children to jail. The next day, when another thousand-plus students rolled out of church and down the street, Bull Connor ordered high pressure water hoses, dogs and batons be turned on them.

Birmingham now has the attention of the world.

It’s 2023, and last Wednesday, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, walked out of school protesting gun violence and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little to stop it.

One of the Uvalde students was Jazmin Cazares, a senior at Uvalde High School. Her 9-year-old sister, Jacklyn, was one of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary. 

Jazmin was part of what she described on Twitter as a 77-minute sit-in, explaining, “That’s how long it took for police to enter rooms 111 and 112 at Robb Elementary.”

Students have been marching with urgency since the 2018, school shooting in Parkland, Florida., stole 17 lives. The name of the student-led movement arising from that massacre, “March for Our Lives” is an indictment of a nation whose leaders leave children with no option but to march for their lives.

Their marching and activism make many uncomfortable because marching and activism always makes people uncomfortable. Nonviolent protest is supposed to make people uncomfortable.

While imprisoned in Birmingham, Easter weekend, 60 years ago, Dr. King began composing his classic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to clergy critical of him and the protests.

“You may well ask,” King wrote, “‘Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And it worked.

Because of Barbara Johns and her schoolmates, their lawsuit was one of the five cases of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate wasn’t equal. 

A statue of Barbara Johns will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

Because of children marching in Birmingham, city leaders and business owners desegregated public facilities.

There is a direct line between Barbara Johns’ generation and Jazmin Cazares’ generation.

So, walk together children. Don’t you get weary.

Maine Writer calls on American youth to rally our recalcitrant policy leaders and champion a movement to improve our national human condition. 

Children before guns: The Second Amendment was not written to enable mass murder!

I have to tell my son.

This echo essay was published in the Abilene Reporter News by Nancy Kaffer of the Detroit Free Press. 

Michigan State University mass shooting- Februaray 13, 2023

My son went to bed at 9 p.m. 

Monday, because he’s 12 and it’s a school night, before I saw the news alerts rolling in: a shooting on Michigan State University’s campus.

The shooter was still on the loose. One person, reportedly, slain; five at Sparrow Hospital. It’s 11:30 p.m., and I’m watching the news. The dead now number three, and there’s a blurry picture of the shooter on my screen. I hope at least they catch the guy before my son wakes up. At least then I can say it’s over.

I can’t not tell him, not anymore. He has a phone. He has a laptop, required for school. He has friends with phones and laptops and older siblings. I had to tell him about the mass shooting at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. He listened, quietly – he is not, by nature, quiet – and asked: “Are you sending me to school tomorrow?”

Will lawmakers act to prevent gun violence?

My son's first active shooter drill was kindergarten. I didn’t know. They didn’t have active shooter drills when I was his age. 

There had been a substitute teacher, clearly as blindsided by the drill as any of her young charges. Administrators used a code name to communicate the actions of the fictional shooter. It made the drill seem real.

He came home that day earnestly explaining to me that his class had to hide in the bathroom, because a bad guy had been in the school.

This morning, a story penned by my colleague Clara Hendrickson led the Detroit Free Press website: “Michigan lawmakers want to curb gun violence. What gun safety researchers suggest.” 

Michigan Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, tweeted that Democrats are prepping a slate of gun reform bills. Things are different now. 

There’s a caucus on firearm safety. It has 50 members.

It’s too early to know whether the laws supported by vast majorities of Michiganders but blocked by right-wing politicians and the gun lobby – universal background checks, red flag and safe storage laws – could have stopped it. We know what happened, but we don't know how. We don't know why.

After dinner Monday night, we watched an episode of a sitcom we’ve been streaming. I paused the show to explain a grown-up joke to my son, and he laughed and laughed, delighted, for once, to be inside the circle of adulthood.

It's six and a half hours until I have to tell him.

Growing up with these tragedies

This isn’t the first time; it won’t be the last. I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m meant to be empathetic but matter of fact, to validate his feelings, but make him feel safe. I’m told to watch him for signs of trauma. I have to keep my cool. If I lose it, he will, too.

The children at Michigan State University are older than my son, six or 10 or 12 years; a gulf to him – to me, the blink of an eye. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he took his first steps?

Last month, my son saw footage on YouTube of the shooter in Uvalde, Texas, a kid running away, down the school hall. He looked that child up, afterwards. He thinks that child died.

He told me, later, what he had seen. At first he thought it was a fake. Then he was caught, unable to turn away. Why would anyone put that footage online? Why would anyone watch it on purpose? 

Why won’t anyone make it stop?

“To give a little context, I saw some footage of the Uvalde, Tex., Robb Elementary School shooting on YouTube,” he wrote last month. “What I saw definitely scared me. Then I thought … why is gun violence still happening? Why is this happening? Why do politicians pretty much completely ignore it? Like it didn’t happen. Like a dozen kids didn’t just die?

“This needs to stop. Politicians need to stop choosing money over death. What soul do you have if you let kids die, and teachers, and as a matter of fact regular people, die, and choose money?”

It’s six hours, now, until I have to tell him, and my newsroom is reporting that the shooter has killed himself, another thing I’ll struggle to explain.

“They just do that,” I’ll say. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why they do any of it.”

This time, I can tell him, the people in Lansing are listening. They’re prepping some new laws. They’re going to pass those bills, and the governor will sign them. Would those laws have made a difference?

“We don’t know,” I’ll tell him, “but it can’t get worse". 

"We need to do everything we can. Whatever we can.”

Because he’s right: This needs to stop.

#MarchForOurLives

Born out of a tragic school shooting, March For Our Lives is a courageous youth-led movement dedicated to promoting civic engagement, education, and direct action by youth to eliminate the epidemic of gun violence.

Nancy Kaffer is a Detroit Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com

Guns are the cause of gun violence in schools

America is again reeling from yet another deadly mass shooting. The victims at Santa Fe High School in Texas were killed by guns.

Target hardening, also referred to simply as hardening when made clear by the context, is a term used by police officers, those working in security, and the military referring to the strengthening of the security of a building or installation in order to protect it in the event of attack or reduce the risk of theft.

Unbelievably, Betsy DeVos, is charged, by her cabinet appointment, to protect children from gun violence in schools, but she is ignoring guns as the cause of "gun violence". #Marchforourlives

W.B. Ray High School Principal Cissy Reynolds-Perez has suggested a better approach

March for our Lives

Betsy DeVos’s federal school safety commission won’t look at guns
The commission was formed after a mass shooting. But it won’t look at guns.

An echo opinion by Tom Whitehurst Jr. published in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Thank God they didn't "harden" Carroll High School when I was a student. They didn't call it hardening back then. But there was serious talk about fencing and heightening security after Donnie Contreras was shot in the back, in the fall of 1973, during my junior year.

A teenage non-student who came to campus gunning for someone else shot Donnie by mistake, paralyzing him below the chest. We all knew it could have happened to any of us on that day. But we weren't worried that it would happen again. We were right.

Editorial board member Allison Ehrlich remembers the 1999 Columbine shooting from the perspective of a graduating senior at King High School. She and her classmates were shocked, but from a safe distance, at what what they knew instinctively was an anomaly. They didn't think they'd be next. They were right.

Things no longer seem remote or unlikely since the May 18 shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, that left 10 dead. Some survivors talked as if they half-expected something like it to happen. They were right.

The transition from fear to anticipation and acceptance that it'll happen to them is the disturbing change that has occurred since as recently as the Valentine's Day massacre in Parkland, Fla.

• Imagine going to school with the still statistically remote possibility of a shooting weighing heavily on your mind. 
• Also imagine school being like a fortress.

That's the solution favored by the Texas lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Rather than dealing with the cause of gun violence ~ meaning "guns" the Texas officials are deflecting the issue by advocating for more guns! In a guest column for USA TODAY, Attorney General Ken Paxton urged that the Israeli approach to school security be considered. He also lamented "a deep-seated cultural decay — fatherless children, degradation of human life across society, widespread moral confusion, etc." Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said pretty much the same. (Guards operate under the auspices of the Israel Police and undergo rigorous training every four months. Roughly 40% of applicants fail the training test, ensuring that only the cream of the crop defend the schools.) ~ IOW- more guns!

These Texas elected politicians should look past the ends of their noses, rather than update the old (wrong minded) Reagan-era myth of the welfare queen, for political purposes. They might notice that dads these days are more hands-on than any time in human history. The Class of 2018 are probably (and justifiably!) sick of all the helicoptering.

Sure, divorce has soared. But let's be real about that. Many of today's divorced couples would have stayed married in name only in previous generations.

"Degradation of human life" might be code for abortion. Patrick didn't bother with code. He actually wove abortion into his Santa Fe shooting narrative. Yet, abortion is more restricted than at any time since Roe vs. Wade, especially in Texas.

Moreover, Israel is a country where everyone serves mandatory military service because, unlike Santa Fe, Texas, Israel is perpetually under threat of annihilation. Israeli school security is not extreme for Israel, but it would be extreme for Texas.

It also would be expensive. It requires people, special skills and equipment. It's astonishingly two-faced of Paxton, defender of the state's woefully inadequate school funding system and basically a perennial foe of public school spending, to talk about school security measures that would cost real money.

He and Patrick are just blowing smoke to keep gun restrictions out of the conversation.

Maybe Israeli-style security would have thwarted the Santa Fe shooter. But Ray High School Principal Cissy Reynolds-Perez has suggested a better approach that might have identified and dissuaded him from picking up a gun in the first place — more school guidance counselors. She points out that school counselors might be assigned to 500 to 700 students, which she compared accurately to a small town, population-wise.

Reynolds-Perez made that suggestion during a round table assembled by Gov. Greg Abbott in response to the Santa Fe shooting. Our governor, to his credit, has shown a much more open mind than would have been expected of an avowed gun-rights enthusiast such as himself. He said we must take action. He assembled the round table with a mix of people guaranteed to bring differing views. And Abbott refused to declare gun restrictions off limits.

Reynolds-Perez attracted attention to the cause in March, when she instigated a Corpus Christi ISD-wide meeting with our state legislative delegation after the Parkland shooting. She also asked the entire Ray student body to write letters to share their feelings and suggestions — and received responses from almost all. Her recommendations to the round table reflected those responses.

When CNN invited Reynolds-Perez for an on-camera interview, she brought along 11 Ray students. She told CNN that Abbott "genuinely heard our voices" during the round table. 

Something consequential just might be in motion. 

That's good because something has to change. It's graduation weekend for many high schools and Parkland and Santa Fe has defined the Class of 2018.

We talk about preserving our way of life, often in context of protecting or expanding Second Amendment rights. The way of life we should defend at all cost is a carefree high school experience not dependent on a police state — like what existed before Donnie was shot in the back.   

Tom Whitehurst Jr. at tom.whitehurst@caller.com

Echo letter from Kentucky ~ support students against gun violence

An echo opinion letter published in the Lexington Kentucky Herald Leader in support of students who are protesting gun violence. 

#MarchForOurLives

I have a simple message for the brave students featured in a recent edition of the Herald- Leader: You are not alone. 

One article noted the cruelty directed at three Marshall County High School students who spoke out against gun violence, while another reported that the valedictorian and the student council president of Holy Cross High School (?!) were denied the opportunity to speak at graduation due to their history of advocating for social justice.

Please know that in spite of how isolating it may feel at any given time, there are people throughout Kentucky who agree with you and who admire you. Your public display of courage on these important issues makes it easier for others who quietly agree to face their own fears and join you.  From Greg Erhardt in Lexington KY

Florida echo~ National Rifle Association's lobbyist pay for influence

A Pensacola Florida opinion explains how Senator Marco Rubio continues to support the agenda of the National Rifle Association (NRA), even after two mass gun violence slaughters have killed and irreparably harmed his Florida's constituents. (Pulse Nightclub in Orlando FL June 12, 2016, where 50 people were killed and 58 injured; and the February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School slaughter, where 17 children were killed by a gunman.) This carnage is enabled by lobbyists who buy influence.

Opinion echo from a letter written by Patricia Edmisten and originally published in the Pensacola News Journal

Enough is Enough!

PENSACOLA, Fl ~ On Valentine’s Day, 2018, a sick young man took 17 innocent lives at Parkland High School. Surviving students plead with legislators to stand up to the NRA and do the right thing by banning assault weapons.

Femme Fatale, Marian Hammer, who ably represents the NRA in Florida, is a powerful lobbyist. She monitors legislators who depart from her talking points and the bills she helps to write on gun laws. Our legislators have sold their souls for an A-plus (MaineWriter~ but deserving of an F- public rating) NRA rating and funding from Ms. Hammer’s handlers. Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who received $3.3 million from the NRA, is also opposed to any ban on assault weapons. Nationally, the NRA just convinced Mr. Trump to reverse his gut impulse to call for a ban on assault weapons sales and a registration tax on ownership.

Article II of the Constitutional Amendments 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.” The second clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” qualifies the first clause, “a well regulated Militia” And so it was understood until 2008, when, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court established an “individual rights” interpretation. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S 570 (2008). Like most rights, the Second Amendment is not unlimited. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose” (Commentary, http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/). 

In fact, the Supreme Court stressed that the right to keep and bear arms is subject to restriction, that protected arms are those used “for lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home,” in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939).

Before and during the American Revolution, the United States had no standing army. To win independence the colonies required militias comprised of ordinary men, many of them farmers, who knew how to use a pistol, musket, or rifle. (Muskets relied on a flintlock, spark, gunpowder, and lead. They were fired from the shoulder and could only be fired four times a minute by a trained soldier.) The militias were subject to local control.

The majority of Americans want reasonable restrictions on guns. The banning of assault weapons and the requirement of universal background checks are not the first steps in a movement to deprive citizens of the weapons they keep for legitimate purposes, such as hunting and self-defense. My husband grew up on a North Carolina farm. Guns were a normal part of family life because they were used to bring home game for the table. No one, however, used anything more powerful than a 12-gauge shotgun.

Psychological screening of individuals who pose a threat to themselves and others is not a science. While desirable, it is magical thinking to believe that mental health professionals will be able to catch every instance of aberrant, violent thinking or behavior that may or may not lead to actual violence. 

Moreover, the arming of teachers is a dangerous and ludicrous decision that will undermine students’ relationships with teachers and further endanger them. While an armed school officer might lessen the carnage, it’s likely that he or she would be among the first eliminated. And even if the FBI and every local sheriff’s department acts precisely as they should, there is only one sure way to make mass killings less likely. We must accept reasonable restrictions upon gun ownership. Let’s start by requiring universal background checks and ban assault weapons and large capacity magazines. And to those legislators who continue to carry water for the NRA, I say grow a spine.

Patricia Edmisten is retired from the University of West Florida where she taught sociological foundations of education and served as director of the office of International Education and Programs.

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Parkview Kyle Kashuv is a wrong minded apologist for common sense

#enoughisenough ~ Kyle Kashuv is wrong minded ~ needs 6 minutes 30 seconds of contemplation about guns. He needs counseling about how to understand common sense gun control regulations like registration of automatic weapons.

My advice to the student apologist Kyle Kashuv:

Practice writing #enoughisenough 100 times on a blackboard ~

Followed by the names of the children and teachers who were murdered in his school, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, on February 14, 2018, and to do it all in 6 minutes and 30 seconds, the time it took for the murderer to kill his colleagues with a gun.

Scott Beigel, 35, geography teacher and coach

Aaron Feis, 37

It is with Great sadness that our Football Family has learned about the death of Aaron Feis. He was our Assistant Football Coach and security guard. He selflessly shielded students from the shooter when he was shot. He died a hero and he will forever be in our hearts and memories.

Alyssa Alhadeff, 14
Martin Duque Anguiano, 14

Jaime Guttenberg, 14

Nicholas Dworet, 17

Meadow Pollack, 18

Martin Duque, 14

Luke Hover, 15

Gina Montalto, 14

Joaquin Oliver, 17 ~ became a US citizen January 2017

Alaina Petty, 14

Meadow Pollack, 18

Helena Ramsey, 17

Alex Schachter, 14 ~ National Merit Scholar semi-finalist

Carmen Schentrup, 16

Peter Wong, 15 ~ student ROTC

#All_Gun_Violence_Is_Preventable

#MarchForOurLives

#NeverAgain

#NotOneMore

#SandyHookPromise

March For Your Lives in Brunswick and in Maine

Grandmothers against gun violence (Juliana L'Heureux second from left~ Brunswick Maine)

At Least 15 ‘March For Our Lives’ Events Planned In Maine

Hundreds of thousands of ralliers from across the world — including Maine — are expected to mobilize Saturday to call for an end to gun violence. ~ Maine Public News Network by Jennifer Mitchell

Like many historical actions urging social change, Saturday’s “March For Our Lives,” organized by survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, is being driven by young people.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to let up in my generation. Like, this is something as a whole we really feel very strongly about,” says Aurora Hodgdon, 15, a student at Sanford High School who is in D.C. with her grandmother to take part in the rally. “It happens so much in America you become desensitized to it, but this isn’t a normal thing around the world. There’s not regularly school shootings every week in any other country.”

Hodgdon’s grandmother, Michelle Hodgdon, 58, says while she remembers the very tail end of atomic bomb drills during the “duck and cover” Cold War years, she remembers her school years as relatively peaceful.

“To me it is mind boggling that we even have to talk about this. I don’t understand why it’s not an emergency situation, nationally,” she says.

Both say they want to see better laws in place to control the availability of deadly firearms.

More than 700 gatherings are taking place across the country, with dozens of solidarity marches planned across the world, on every continent except Antarctica.

In Maine, there are at least 15 planned rallies, including those in Bangor, Portland, Lewiston, Presque Isle, Brunswic and Bar Harbor.

 

Brunswick Maine gazebo mall on Maine Street

Echo from Amarillo ~ stop madness with guns

This is a well composed, compassionate and convincing letter to the editor published in the Amarillo Globe-News by Ray Velasquez

When will the madness of killing large numbers of humans with guns stop?

At concerts, schools, churches - no one seems to be safe.

Do not be misled by the mealy-mouthed comments of (U.S. representative and House Speaker) Paul Ryan, the president and other Republican politicians who it seems have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association and its deep pockets.

There is only one way of stopping these mass killings ~ but giving teachers guns is not among the right preventions.

Indeed, arming teachers is the most insane proposal. 

What if a teacher - in an attempt to keep students safe - shoots two or three pupils? And are students now supposed to be exposed to seeing a body bleed from a gunshot to the heart or head? Where does this fit into acquiring an education?

The problems of insufficient data, the mentally disturbed, copycats and turning concert venues, churches and schools into armed camps is devastating.

Ban the sale of weapons of war to everyday Joes and Janes.
Please, in this country under God, help our children to change this guns-everywhere-lifestyle to a safe and secure environment.

These are loved ones being massacred.

Do not allow politicians to dictate the lives of you and yours.

Rise up and send a message that enough is enough.

March with children. Boycott businesses that allow gun-toters to openly carry weapons.

Those who care - rise up. Tell the politicians that we are taking back the safety of our loved ones from the NRA, Republican politicians and others who are profiting from the sale of these weapons of mass killing.

We have the power to change things - the power of our pocketbooks.

For God’s sake and the sake of our loved ones - do something.

Ray Velasquez,  Amarillo Texas