There’s a great debate going on in America now between the anti-gun groups who organized the recent “March For Our Lives” rally and Second Amendment defenders. The former claim that older people have failed to do what is necessary (defined as “what they want,” which is to ban and confiscated privately-owned guns and repeal the Second Amendment), so we must all, to quote an old Monkees song that only us fogies would know, “yield before the wisdom of a child.”
The other side questions the sanity of thinking that teenagers, who are too young to vote and have never even taken a class in Constitutional law or, apparently, American history – and who, according to their own arguments, are too irrational and immature to be trusted with a gun – are somehow magically blessed with a special knowledge of how to write laws and edit the Bill of Rights. They also note that even many teenagers disagree with radical anti-gun views, but they aren’t welcome by the march organizers and media because they don’t parrot the party line.
Well, it turns out that there is actually a third angle to this debate that is only now coming to light: that so-called “children’s crusade” wasn’t just organized by adults, it was also largely attended by adults.
The Washington Times reports that a University of Maryland sociology professor with a six-person research team went to the rally and interviewed a random sample of 256 people to create a profile of the typical attendee. They found that 27% had never attended a protest before, which might illustrate a jump in support for gun control. However, they also found that many of the attendees were lured as much by free music as by the issue. But here’s the most stunning finding of all: the researchers estimate that only 9.7% of the crowd was under the age of 18. In fact, the professor reported that the average age of the adults attending was the highest of any crowd she’s studied since Donald Trump’s Inauguration.
So before you start thinking that young people have all been radicalized by the left, or that their youthful naiveté is being exploited by political opportunists, take heart in knowing that 90% of the people at the rally were not misguided youth at all. They were misguided adults, some of whom have probably been politically misguided since they actually were young in the ‘60s, and unlike most of their peers, they never got any wiser with age. It gives you a little more hope for the future, doesn’t it?
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