In the history of protests, there is probably nothing less inspiring than a high-schooler refusing to go to school.   It's as if the children threatened not to eat their vegetables; or as if a bad Catholic, upset with the bedrock teachings of the Church, refused to go to Mass.   You can refuse any number of things, but you can't refuse in the most fun way possible, and if you refuse your food, the response of your "oppressors" should be then don't eat your food.   It's your life, and should you choose to ruin it by getting skinny or playing hookey, I say best of luck to you.   If you really want to make an impression, you should douse yourself in gasoline and set yourself on fire.   That way, we'll know you really mean it.

I'm not against children, but I am 100% against "think of the children."   I like to think of what's best for the grown-ups.   Whatever works best for free, honest, informed, self-reliant, and armed adults works best for their dependents, and if children are anything, they are dependent.   If they grow up into anything, it is more parents.   If you love a child, remember that the purpose of cuteness is to make sure  kids turn into adults – who in turn are in charge of making us more children.

If some kids have to suffer so that most adults can do well in this world, in most cases, I'll throw the kids under the bus faster than you can say "lickety-split."   You get it the other way around, and the end result is that more kids will suffer anyway, like caring more about employees than about businesses, or caring more about the entitlements of citizens than the solvency of the country.     Children are important, but no good, honest, or safe society cares first about its children.   No free republic ever survived by placing the rights of its children above the rights of their parents.   So far as I'm aware, no tyranny ever survived by placing the rights of its children above the rights of their parents.   The end result of even the Cultural Revolution, where Chinese students were encouraged to attack their own parents and professors, was murder upon murder.

In general, you craft the policy around the adults, and everything else falls into place.   The great tragedy of American society is not that we treat too many children too poorly, but that too many people were given rights without ever proving they'd advanced beyond childhood.*   Christ said the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children "such as these."   I don't know how thinking like a child gets you into heaven, but I know how it can get you off the Earth (research the culinary Tide Pod).

This being said, there is no subject in the United States more childishly discussed than the one we have about gun control, and probably because at this moment, children and halfwits are the ones responsible for steering the dialogue.   There are 330 million people in the United States, and at this moment, since 2012, according to The New York Times, there have been 138 deaths by school shooting.   This amounts to 21.3 deaths per year on average – an honorable statistic in a country as populated as ours.   On the other hand, according to Forbes, there were only 31 million Americans who went to Mexico in 2016, and in that same year, we had 75 Americans get murdered while doing it – more American deaths than the total of all other countries combined.

This means that every year, four times as many people are butchered, by foreigners, on vacation, in a single country, out of a pool nearly ten times smaller than the American population.   There is no school shooting epidemic in this country.   The average student is more likely to die from slipping in the bathtub, or going on vacation, and is probably more likely to get molested by his own teacher.   If we really cared more about children's lives, we would ban students from going to Cancún, and if we really cared enough to say not even one, and we considered how many thousands of Americans are killed by Mexicans every year, and how many kids are ruined or killed by Mexican drugs, we would kick it up a notch and ban Mexico altogether.

A little digging on the internet has yielded the fact that, even according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization allegedly against (white) racism and other forms of (white) "hate," illegal aliens are responsible for killing a lot of Americans.   They state that between the end of 2001 and 2006, criminal aliens were 28% of our prisoners, about half of this 28% was considered illegal, and 85,000 murders were committed by our criminal population.   If we were to assume illegal aliens were equal-opportunity murderers, this would still put us at 14% of 85,000, which is 11,900 (2,380 a year), and if we considered them twice as safe as the average American, they would still be killing around 1,200 annually.   This extremely generous number is 60 times higher than the 20.3 students killed yearly in our schools, and this still fails to mention the number of people who are raped by illegal immigrants; who catch deadly third-world diseases; or, as Fox News mentions, who are killed every year by unlicensed drivers (7,500 Americans).   This last number alone is 20 per day compared with the school shooters' 20 per year.   The latest crime statistics are not an improvement.

The problem with America is not that some people don't care about children.   It's that some people have no idea what is going on in the country, and that when they do have an idea, they refuse to consider the problem any further.   You put a child against "guns" – an extreme oversimplification for extremists and simpletons – and the child is more important than "the gun."   You put a white child against a brown man, and the brown man is more important than the white child.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays onLetters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.