Five students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who survived last month’s shooting were featured on the cover of Time magazine’s latest issue with the caption “Enough.” All the students featured on the cover have been advocating for stricter gun laws. They are the “March for Our Lives” organizers Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, Emma González, Cameron Kasky and David Hogg.
Time’s piece looks at the students’ organization of the march, framing it as something they did on their own. The piece doesn’t mention the fact, reported by Buzzfeed, that major leftist groups and public relations organizations have been backing the kids planning the march. Everytown, Move On, Women’s March LA, and Planned Parenthood are among these groups.
The March for Our Lives Action Fund has since registered as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organization that is not required to disclose its donors.
However, none of this warrants coverage from Time. The author of the piece, Charlotte Alter, literally describes the way the children’s movement gained ground as a “mystery.”
She writes, “Most of these kids cannot vote, order a beer, make a hotel reservation or afford a pizza without pooling some of their allowance…. Yet over the past month, these students have become the central organizers of what may turn out to be the most powerful grassroots gun-reform movement in nearly two decades.”
"How a movement catches fire is always a mystery,” she continues, "but the Parkland kids seem matched for this moment. They’re young enough to be victimized by a school shooting, but old enough to shape the aftermath.”
The piece also describes how the kids “painted the NRA and their allies as the mortal enemies of the roughly 50 million schoolkids growing up in what Kasky calls 'the mass-shooting generation.’ They took the mantle of ‘personal protection’ from the gun lobby, while reframing the larger gun debate along generational lines.”
The article mentions the children's “prolific trolling of the NRA,” saying the kids agree that the gun lobby’s spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, is “very hot but kind of scary.”
Meanwhile Time does not mention the Parkland survivors, like Kyle Kashuv, who don’t think stricter gun laws are the answer.
Kashuv responded to the piece on Twitter.
Apparently, the nonexistent, statistically proven to be factually false "school shooting generation" has had enough. https://t.co/FRXpAfaDwm
— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) March 22, 2018
This looks like the cover of an Archie Comic. https://t.co/aUqyo3OGsK
— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) March 22, 2018
He pointed out that polling does not back up the “mass shooting generation” idea.
Huffington Post recently acknowledged that “adults under age 30 are more likely than older Americans to believe that Congress should take action to reduce shootings, according to another HuffPost/YouGov survey taken just after the massacre in Parkland, Florida, but they’re less likely to favor making gun laws stricter, or to count gun issues among their top priorities.”