Guns, Donald Trump, traumatized teenagers

Yahoo! article (Harriet Sinclair, Newsweek):"Trump Reportedly Asked Pals At Mar a Lago What To Do On Gun Control After Florida Shooting"

lol, "asked pals"

"President Donald Trump reportedly asked friends who were staying at Mar a Lago what he should do about gun control following the school shooting in Florida last week."

It's not that he was taking feedback from people or soliciting input from trusted sources. (Which seems like what you should expect him to do, if it should even be noteworthy.) He was "asking his pals what he should do". Lol.

The tone they use in these articles relative to how they'd describe it if it were Obama or a different President is really fascinating.

"According to a number of people who spoke with Trump at Mar a Lago over the two days he was there, the president kept an obsessive eye on media coverage around the shooting, watching interviews with survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, The Washington Post reported on Sunday."

He didn't "work tirelessly to stay briefed on the day's events" as any respectable President would have done. He kept an "obsessive eye", as tho there's something vaguely not right about watching the news coverage.

"And if the president was indeed watching the reaction of the surviving students, they sent a clear message to Trump: take action."

Because what the students say should necessarily shed any light on which course of action is best?

Of course it's horrible that the students had to live thru this. But living thru a crisis doesn't somehow put you in position of knowing how best to respond or prevent a future similar crisis.

If anything it makes you the worst possible person to ask, because you're traumatized by what you just saw and unlikely to be thinking in a long-term or process oriented way. (Just like Americans on September 12th, 2001 were not the right people to go to if you want to find out whether it's wise to start wars.)

The media would actually like you to believe that traumatized teenagers should be a source of guidance for the POTUS. Chew on that for a moment.

The best thing for these kids right now is to get whatever counseling and comforts they need and hopefully readjust. They don't need to be in the national spotlight arguing about legislature. These media outlets should feel gross about pawning them in this way.

Indeed, at a rally organized by student activists from Parkland, high school senior Emma Gonzalez told the crowd: “We need to pay attention to the fact that this isn’t just a mental health issue. He wouldn’t have been able to kill that many people with a knife.”

Ya, but the thing about insane criminals who want to kill people is they don't say "well you know, it's against the law for me to have this, so I won't".

If it were that easy then the law against murder would already be enough.

Drugs should perfectly illustrate that passing a law against something doesn't cause it to not be around anymore. You just shift the distribution into a black market (and now buying them is easier for minors and angry drunks and all the worst categories of people).

She also called out the president, highlighting the significant donations he received from the NRA in advertising sponsorship during the 2016 election campaign, stating: “If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a 'terrible tragedy,' I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the NRA.”

And of course this doesn't mean what the traumatized teenager thinks it means.

Gun freedom would likely have saved lives if it were allowed to occur. (If the school wasn't by law forced to be unarmed.)

Whether Mrs. Killingberry would be lowkey packing in your 5th grade social studies class, or how exactly schools would defend themselves, is immaterial -- what's important is they're allowed to and that there's no longer this known honeypot where lunatics are guaranteed to be able to execute a mass murder plot.

From there it's far less likely to even be a thought that the lunatics have in the first place.

People lobby the government in this way because they don't want everywhere to turn into the same deathtrap scenario.

The great Stefan Molyneux hits it right on the head:

You can't "ban" people from having a particular item in their possession without being the one who's initiating violence. And then you've become the thing that you claim to be opposed to.

Which isn't a trick people tell you because they like guns. It's just how things actually are. And you should take it as indication that you're on the wrong track.

To whatever extent school shootings are a concern, the first/best thing you could do is put your gun down and allow schools and individuals within a school to defend themselves.

The president is expected to meet with some of the Parkland students on Thursday for a “listening session” although it is not yet clear which students will be invited to voice their opinions to Trump.

Wait.. you mean, he's "asking them what he should do", right? 😂😂😂