Walkout Wednesday

Say what you want about the school walkout thing, but it was brilliant. As in, “I wish I had thought of it,” brilliant. It’s times like this I wish I had kids, because I would have had them walk out with pro-gun signs and hand them out to likeminded teens. I’d definitely love teaching them the great pleasure of suing the government for fun and profit if they tried to stop them. The brilliance of it is that kids will take any excuse to get out of school, and these days we don’t really do discipline, so it was kind of inevitable that the schools would accommodate. A bit of ideological sympathy on the part of educators doesn’t hurt either. So you get nice big crowds that are more likely to impress lawmakers, and that can be spun to people who don’t understand activism as a huge generational shift on the issue. See, the future is gun control!

I don’t have kids, but for those of you who do, take a look at what Popehat has to say about the issue, and remember: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

13 thoughts on “Walkout Wednesday”

  1. I look forward to the Walk for Life and other Pro-Life groups merrily suing the sh*t out of school districts which went along with this assault on the 2A when they are denied the same accommodation.

    I imagine the ACLU is also going to laugh all the way to the bank filing suits on behalf of every fringe group demanding marches throughout the school year.

  2. One of my co-worker’s kids walked out with an NRA banner. The allowed protesters ripped it from his hands and stomped on it trying to rip it. Never made the paper.

  3. It was pretty much the children of all the usual leftists, increased by the class cutters and amplified by the media. Good tactics for them but nothing has really changed.

  4. No, you wouldn’t have. IF your kid had made a pro-gun sign, at a school having a protest, they would get harassed by the administration. And you would have known that already. So you would already have been homeschooling them, or you wouldn’t want to start homeschooling in March over a pointless protest.

    This is why childless people shouldn’t get to vote; they don’t work through the intended consequences of their action (much less the unintended consequences).

    1. Yeah, not following you at all. Always being ready to sue my high school over violations along these lines was half the fun of attending my senior year.

  5. I’m going to play “jailhouse psychologist” (analogous to “jailhouse lawyer”)here, but I think the subtle but brilliant thing about the walkout was, that once you get someone to make even a slight gesture on behalf of a position, even by peer pressure, their psychological commitment to the position soars. That has been demonstrated in many formal psychological experiments.

    (Objectively, it works with us, when we are lured to a “gun rights rally” in the capitol, or even for that matter, when we fill out a “survey” coming down strongly on behalf of the 2A.)

    It’s possible that Sebastian’s idea of having a pro-gun kid hand out pro-gun materials, might effectively mitigate the effect, but only for the kid doing it. Or of course, for any other pro-gun kids who were inspired to join in making a pro-gun gesture.

    In the past I recall schools allowing kids to get away with “demonstrations” that were perceived to be “patriotic” in nature, while “dissident” demonstrations would be punished or at least discouraged. That reversed as popular opinion reversed. Most times gestures perceived as anti-social will be punished, while endorsements of popular opinion are rewarded.

  6. The problem my kid had was that they didn’t want to deal with being bullied by their peers for not joining the walk out.

    So my arm was twisted and instead we both played hooky, and we made a range day of it.

    Then she got to go back to school the next day and talk about how awesome shooting a suppressed AR is.

  7. I think it’s disgusting to drag the kids into it in this way. Of course, using children as political props is nothing new–but that doesn’t mean we should stoop to that level.

    And if I had a kid who participated (on either side) I’d ground them for a good while.

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