I admit it, I've never kept up with the Kardashians. My teenage daughter hasn't either, but she does admire Kourtney Kardashian for keeping up with reality and bringing her younger sister back down to it with her iconic "Kim, there’s people that are dying," after Kim cried about losing her $75,000 diamond earring in the ocean in 2011. So, when I asked my daughter what she was going to draw or write on her sign for the March for Our Lives in D.C., she didn’t hesitate. She knew exactly what she wanted to do.
The image below is from Kourtney Kardashian's Instagram "Story" on March 24. Countless teenagers took a picture of my daughter's sign and the sign took on a life of its own, getting thousands of likes on Instagram and Snapchat, and Kourtney's attention.
Because I’m in my 50s and had never seen the meme on social media, I didn’t fully get it. Then, as I watched my teenager bring the image to life with a black Sharpie in our D.C. hotel room before the march, it hit me. Yes, it was poignant, and maybe even funny, to replace “diamond earring” with “Second Amendment rights,” but what hit me the hardest was that my 9th grader got the point immediately while my generation is still trying to wrap our heads around it.
In the early ‘80s, when I was in high school, no parent or child had ever heard of a “school mass shooting.” That changed in 1989 after the first mass shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California thanks to the popularity of assault rifles like the AR-15, but mostly due to an antiquated Second Amendment and lackadaisical gun laws that allowed U.S. consumers to accumulate millions and millions of assault rifles for entertainment and “sport” in the mid ’80s, ‘90s and beyond.
Then in 2016, after the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, Mother Jones provided a clear, comprehensive time-line on America’s gun-buying habits spanning four decades. Yet, the GOP did nothing to change its views on the Second Amendment or gun laws. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/gun-industry-nra-assault-weapon-timeline/
When will this change? When money is no longer part of the equation? When politicians' pockets are no longer lined by the NRA and gun manufacturers' profits?
Because we know the numbers -- 96 people die from gun violence every day. That amounts to over 35,000 people killed by guns every year.
And last month, Newsweek published that the number of children killed by guns since the Sandy Hook massacre outnumber the amount of soldiers killed since 9/11: 7,000 children killed by guns in five years.
Still, the GOP doesn't care enough about children to actually do something to stop this preventable disease. More children have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook than U.S. soldiers in combat since 9/11
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If Second Amendment rights and America’s passion for guns actually reduced the number of deaths from gun violence, my teenager wouldn’t be marching on Capitol Hill with hundreds of thousands of her peers pleading for gun reform. Our youth wouldn’t be dying in their classrooms, their churches and on the streets, and survivors wouldn’t be shouting, “Enough is enough!” and “Never again!” -- and above all else, the courageous youth that represent poor black and brown people and neighborhoods, who've known and seen gun violence their whole lives, wouldn’t need to remind politicians that poverty isn’t a crime, that bullets don’t discriminate and guns don’t vote, people do.
The youth standing up against gun violence are also soon-to-be registered voters. America is now awakening to new gatekeepers who will no longer tolerate those in power who benefit from the gun lobby, and they will vote out lawmakers who continue to do nothing.
Even privileged Kim Kardashian is ‘woke’ now, as my teenager would say. She was at the March in D.C. with her family, standing with the rest of us, her life forever changed by men with guns who held her captive. She has evolved as a woman and mother, and like me, I imagine she’s worried sick for her children’s future. She knows all too well that no diamond is worth a life, and no amount of money will ever stop a bullet from an AR-15.
Thankfully, Kim and her sisters have changed since 2011. If only the elephant in the room, the GOP, would do the same.
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