OPINION:
Parkland, Florida, students returned to school, post-shooting, to receive their newest mandated accessories: clear backpacks and identification badges, and a line of security checks.
They’re not happy about it. And they have a point.
But then again, they don’t. The clamp-down on freedoms these students are now suffering is pretty much what some of them have been trying to inflict on the entirety of America is recent weeks. Either way, the life lessons they’re learning right now are almost too harsh for words.
“It’s difficult, we all now have to learn how to deal with not only the loss of our friends, but now our right to privacy,” said one student to CNN. “My school was a place where everyone felt comfortable. It was a home away from home and now that home has been destroyed.”
He’s right. It’s the old “government is not the solution, government is the problem” adage put forth so frequently by Ronald Reagan in word and deed — the line of thought that says once the big government comes a-calling, the individual rights go a-choking.
Mandating students cart about clear backpacks isn’t going to put a stop to school shootings.
It simply means the shooter is going to hide the gun somewhere else.
Mandating students wear ID badges at all times isn’t going to halt school violence.
It’s just going to slap the kids who mean no harm — the innocents — with a stigma of guilt they don’t deserve.
This is how a police state operates, not a free society. What’s happening in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is the students are being treated to the government special — the trade-off of rights for a little bit of security. And in this case, the little bit of security is akin to what the Transportation Security Administration offers fliers — lots of searches and body imaging and long lines, but little common-sense policy.
Simply put, it’s unfortunate these school kids have to go through this ordeal, all in the name of fake safety and security — all for the purpose of giving the powers-who-be in the administration and in the political world the ability to shake their heads soberly and say, “We did something.”
That all said … some of these Parkland kids are the same who’ve been trampling about the nation in recent days, demanding the adults step aside from society and let them rule — demanding an end to the Second Amendment as we know it, and calling out the NRA members of the nation as murderers and child killers.
David Hogg, one of the most vocal, even went so far as to hang a $1.05 tag on one of the podium microphones from which he’s spoken lately to signify the cost that Sen. Marco Rubio was paid for each student life in Florida affected by gun violence. His meaning? Rubio’s acceptance of donations from the NRA.
That was just one vicious attack from these student-dominated “March For Our Lives” protesters against innocent Americans who’ve done nothing more than exercise their God-given, constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights.
So now the students themselves are feeling a bit out of sorts for the intrusions into their privacies — the mandates from above that have been thrust on them in the same of safety and security?
Well, it’s truly a get-what-you-ask-for moment. These clear backpacks, these mandated school IDs — this is what happens when you demand government to act, when you demand government to protect and solve.
These Parkland students have already learned a harsh and terrible lesson about the preciousness of life.
Now, maybe with these mandates, they’re learning another harsh and first-hand lesson about the preciousness of individual rights and the greatness of the God-given principle that makes up our country’s DNA.
It’s only horrible they have to learn the lesson this way.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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