butthatsanothershow:

anarcho-animeism:

i’d love to be able to say, “oh, they’re just kids, they don’t need to be 100% radical whatever all the time.” except that a) they’ve built a mass movement and b) made specific policy demands. 

these demands are resoundingly backwards – expanding police presence on campus, opening up police access to medical records and criminalizing disabled bodies, asserting the need for militarized police forces – and now have mass support from an uncritical base that’s backing them on the grounds that they’re being made by students. the amount of facebook posts i’ve had to crawl between praising their ability to ‘speak truth to power’ is astonishing; sure, they’ve stood up to the (also reactionary) NRA and rightist senators, but that alone does not a platform make.

It’s important to note that those “demands” for expanding police presence and criminalizing mental health do not stem from the actual official March for Our Lives movement.  

As far as I can tell, these proposals comes from an article from The Guardian which allowed 10 students from the MSD high school newspaper, Eagle Eye, to write an article for the website. (article can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/parkland-students-manifesto-americas-gun-laws)  These students are not the ones who have been leading the march or the ones who have been seen speaking out to the media recently.

The March for Our Lives petition/website does not include these suggestions. 

 The actual March for Our Lives petition demands only include an assault weapons ban, prohibiting high capacity magazines and closing the loophole in background checks.  The official petition can be found here: https://marchforourlivespetition.com/  The March for Our Lives website includes funding for gun violence research and intervention and eliminating restrictions on the ATF (which includes things like digitizing gun sales records and instituting safety requirements, did you know guns shown to have manufacturing defects are not required to issue a recall, even if people are killed because of it?)  Information found here: https://marchforourlives.com/how-we-save-lives/

If I am wrong, please let me know, but as far as I can tell the only source for these proposals are this one article, none of the official March for Our Lives includes any proposals for increased armed security or allowing police access to mental health records.