Yesterday, two survivors from the Florida school shooting went on CNN and accused pro-Second Amendment Republicans of “accepting blood money” from the NRA. They declared that those who support the NRA are “against children” and “funding killers.”
Their claims were absurd, of course, and not in the slightest bit accurate, but they can be excused for their sensationalism. They’re kids. And they’re traumatized. My heart breaks for them.
Indeed, I feel nothing but compassion for all of the kids who’ve been giving these anti-gun lectures on the news over the past several days. No decent person can be angry with a child who just suffered such a terrible trauma. I can, however, be angry with the Left and the media for hiding behind that trauma. So, it is to the latter ground that I say this:
You are despicable.
It’s one thing to bring a child on TV and ask him about the tragedy itself — what he saw, heard, felt, etc. But there is no legitimate or honest reason to start probing his political opinions. He didn’t become an expert on constitutional law just because he witnessed a mass shooting. His ideas on the subject are just as undeveloped and immature as they were before the tragedy. The only difference is that now those undeveloped and immature ideas have a certain emotional weight. You hope to use that emotional weight to crush your ideological opponents. You are weaponizing their suffering.
I don’t think these kids are intentionally lying. When they say that Republicans are “funding killers,” they are saying what they honestly believe — and probably were told — is true. But you know better. So when you bring a shell-shocked kid on TV to say untrue things, he is not lying but you are. And worse, you are hiding the lie under the bodies of 17 dead children. I don’t have the words to express how contemptible this tactic truly is.
Those of us who care about the truth are left with two options, neither of them ideal. We can surrender to the emotional blackmail and just let the propaganda stand unchallenged. Or we can state the truth, and risk coming across as heartless sociopaths fact checking a mass shooting survivor. You win either way, in your mind. And maybe you do. Maybe the strategy works. But it’s still evil. And I think it should be stated for the record that you don’t care at all about these kids. They are just a means to an end for you.
Shame on you.