The Smithsonian Institute is a cluster of museums funded by the United States government. In other words, by you and I. Now, they're using their taxpayer funding for one of the most ironic things: to advocate in favor of gun control and against the Second Amendment.
They're using our taxpayer dollars to rally against the Constitution and the protections laid out in it.
And they're doing that by paying tribute to the 30+ Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who founded the gun control group March For Our Lives following the tragedy in Parkland, Florida.
The Smithsonian Magazine's December feature is about how the students "showed us how to find meaning in tragedy."
Specifically, the piece dives into how the group formed just days following the deadly shooting. But what's most disgusting is the author of the piece compared the March For Our Lives bus tour to that of the freedom riders.
Here's an excerpt from the piece (emphasis mine):
“We were going 93 million miles an hour,” González told me recently of those early weeks. “We never wanted a break. We never wanted to wait.” That speed and intensity paid off: Only five weeks after the shooting, the “March for Our Lives” rally in Washington drew up to 800,000 people, and inspired sister marches in 800 cities around the globe.
After that, no one could have blamed the students if they had wanted to step back. They’d done more than their share. And because the movement had turned them into public figures, they had to withstand attacks from some NRA supporters, as well as right-wing pundits and politicians. Meanwhile, they still had high school to finish. They had their lives to piece back together, college on the horizon.
Instead, founders including Corin, Hogg, Jammal Lemy, and brothers Matt and Ryan Deitsch, dreamed up a nationwide bus tour, inspired in part by the 1964 Freedom Summer, when student volunteers fanned out across Mississippi to register African-American voters. In this case, in addition to registering voters, they’d connect with other young activists to promote the movement’s broadening agenda, which now includes ten specific policy goals, from banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines to funding gun violence research, which has been blocked since 1996 after lobbying by the NRA and others.
This summer’s “Road to Change” tour lasted two months and included 50 cities. At any given time about 20 Parkland leaders and student activists from elsewhere traveled together on a white-and-silver bus, flanked by two black SUVs with security guards. (Hogg in particular has raised the ire of some fanatics, and has received repeated death threats despite regularly reminding the public that he and the movement support the Second Amendment, and that his father, a former FBI agent, owns a Glock.) A separate Florida tour included 25 cities, and visited every legislative district in the state. The bus was the students’ “safe space,” Corin said: no press allowed. The small group of adults onboard included a therapist and publicity and event crews who helped with media, hotel reservations and other logistics. “Anyone over 20 works for us,” Hogg told me one afternoon in Oakland, California. “They are our interns.”
...
Corin, ever the organizer, ran logistics, connecting with youth leaders at each stop. Hogg, a policy wonk, researched each community’s demographics and its history of youth voter turnout and mass shootings. “It’s not just for speeches,” Hogg told me. “When I talk to people one-on-one, I need to understand the place I’m talking about.” González brought inspiration, mischievousness and light, including for Hogg, who considered González his closest friend on the tour. In a back room at the Lyric Theatre, she ruffled Hogg’s hair as he sat hunched over his laptop; later, as Hogg peppered me with facts about the NRA, she walked up to him, put her face a couple of inches from his, and burped.
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First of all, there is absolutely zero comparison between the gun control bus tour and the Freedom Riders. Comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. They are not the same.
The Freedom Riders were wanting equality for all. They were wanting everyone to be free, to be on the same playing field.
The March For Our Lives' bus tour focused on passing gun control legislation. Their goal was to infringe on people's Second Amendment rights and turn law-abiding gun owners into criminals and felons. They threw around scary words, like "assault weapons" and "high-capacity magazines" to get the uneducated youth on their side.
What's even sadder is that Hogg is their so-called "policy wonk." Although he likes to say he knows anything and everything about guns because his dad is an "FBI agent with a Glock," he knows very little about firearms and their mechanisms. Gun journalists had to school him about AR-15s, he pushed fake statistics about mass shootings and went on a tangent about how no one cares about children's lives unless they favor gun control.
The Smithsonian shouldn't be getting involved in policy debates like gun control and the Second Amendment. And they sure as hell shouldn't be using taxpayer's dollars to advocate for their individual policy preferences.
I have a problem with this. And you should too.
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