For all of those who are angry about the Parkland attack and those before it, and who insist that the experiences of the newly minted child-activists for rescinding the Second Amendment require us to do what they demand, ask yourselves: do I want a society where my rights are determined by the raw and manipulated emotions of my accusers?  Do I want my rights decided by what children feel?  It is self-evident to rational people that anger, especially misinformed anger, is not a basis for good policy.  However, it is all that progressives can offer.  At least it helps them to deflect that armed teachers would have ended that attack before more of those children died, making their refusal to allow that defense for years an act of complicity in its outcome.

Being a victim and being young do not make one nobler or smarter than he was before he was attacked.  The experience of being attacked certainly makes one vulnerable to exploitation by those who would manipulate the victim, but it does nothing to enlarge the victim's limited understanding of complex issues that are often polluted by corruption and disinformation.   Victimhood does not create virtue or wisdom, but it does cause rage and emotion among those cultivated to default to feelings.

Inflamed emotion is the left's engine of change, and the left prizes coercive change above all things.  Everything that stands in the way of their crusade to remake America must go.  Nothing prevents oppressive change more than an armed citizenry, so nothing needs changing as much or as quickly as that relic of individual liberty.  You can't make people servants of an all-powerful government when they can still prevent being bound to the yoke chosen for them by their "betters."

We who still believe in the Bill of Rights are presently being treated to a hefty serving of hate, not because we have done something wrong, but because we have refused to surrender.  We have declined the demand that we sacrifice our rights to make happy those who would overwhelm and control us.  We have resisted the demands that we permit "commonsense" acts that are anything but sensible, which will erode or erase our rights to defend ourselves against those making the demands.  We are told we must continually agree to incremental rescission of the Second Amendment, but progressives can create rights out of whole cloth to which we can neither object nor suggest limits.  We are to pretend that we don't see this, or understand where it is intended to lead, and we certainly are not permitted to discuss it without being attacked. 

As a country, we should ask ourselves a few things: is it virtuous or wise that the rights of all citizens should be determined by public protests arising from the experiences, identities, politics, or emotions of those few whose positions are shaped by their involvement in an event or a group?  Is it virtuous or wise to listen to those demanding, on the basis of a subjective experience, that rights be taken from millions of citizens who played no part in their event and committed no crime?  How about this: should the rights of Americans be determined by the most emotional among us?  Should our human right of self-defense be decided by the very people who have ensured that mass shootings continue to occur in "gun-free zones" because their agenda isn't advanced by actually protecting people in those zones?  Should our rights be decided by angry children?  Should we condone seeing children who have been willfully exposed to this danger manipulated to demand "change" by those who consciously make their schools fertile ground for shooters?  Are the children who were forced into shooting galleries by their sudden political friends wise enough, or mature enough, to process and understand these facts? 

Progressive change is never about what is best, or wise, or virtuous.  This explains why their solution is never tailored to cure the alleged problem.  It is about what is necessary to their seizure of power and control over all things.  Emotion is the enemy of wisdom.  Rage and reason are mutually exclusive.  Those who knowingly force children into gun-free zones have an unlimited capacity for cynicism, knowing that it will go badly for anyone who points out that the emotions of those children should not bring about the wholesale revocation of rights that children do not understand, with effects they cannot fathom in their limited experience.  The adults understand, even if the children do not, that the larger goal is the disarmament of free people whose insistence upon individual liberty has no place in the new progressive political order.  The children have no idea that the behemoth they are helping grow will one day consume them, too.

Many children and adults know nothing about the people who lawfully own guns, yet they are taught to hate them instinctively.  They know nothing about the social and cultural observations of lawful gun-owners over the last few decades and how the country is being transformed by the irrational hatred with which the vulnerable are indoctrinated within progressivism.  They have no concept of what it is like to watch a country succumb to groupthink, bigotry, hatred, censorship, and incitement to open violence against them for holding the very beliefs upon which this country thrived for hundreds of years.  They do not realize the rights that Americans once had relative to those they now have, or see where that erosion inevitably has led throughout history.   They do not understand that the extent of degradation of our culture and society is directly proportionate to the rise of progressivism.  The shooters whom so many fear have appeared in direct proportion to the left's control of education, entertainment, media, health care, perception of religion, and the criminal justice system. 

Lambs are not equipped to lead their shepherds, yet they are told they are guiding us as they are herded where their adult handlers want them to go.  They have no idea what they stand to lose, or how much harm they are being led to commit.  If they succeed, they will only have diminished their own country and their own future.  Once our rights are forfeit, theirs are, too.  Shame on the adults who are doing this to them and to us.