“Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards,” LaPierre said. “We care about our president, so we protect him with armed secret service agents.” Yet when it comes to our children, “we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of the world know it and exploit it.”
By placing children in schools in the same category as banks and powerful politicians LaPierre and the NRA either willfully obscure essential and obvious differences or demonstrate unbelievable ignorance.
Banks and powerful politicians are not the same as children in schools. There are good reasons why the former are targets while children are not: banks and political leaders are sites of power and by definition they affect, often through coercion, the lives of a great many people.
Suggesting children in schools are equivalent to banks and politicians obscures that their very innocence and vulnerability is their ‘power,’ if an equivalence is needed. This innocence is a big reason we love our children so much; it is also why we often look backward from our positions as adults with a lingering feeling that if we were able to carry this openness to life a little further into adulthood the world would be a better place.
In this respect the sentiments of LaPierre and the NRA do a great dis-service to children, to what is wonderful about them and what they can teach us adults.
