“People are associating guns with people having bad ideas,” Wilson said. “There’s talk of repealing the Second Amendment — you can’t just go attack something like that.” So, on April 2, they painted the spirit rock with the phrases “Defend the 2nd Amendment” and “Shall NOT be infringed,” with the top reading “#NRA.” An American flag was painted on another side of the rock. Within 12 hours, everything but the flag had been painted over.
“I was pretty p***ed,” he added. “I knew it would be painted over, but not that early.”
Wilson noted that the conservative students had been careful to wait for three weeks in order not to dishonor the students who took part in the walkout or those murdered in the Parkland shooting. When they met with Assistant Principal Rick Arena, he insisted that the the rock was only intended for “school spirit,” and that their “political views” had nothing to do with the decision to paint the rock over. “The rock is supposed to be about school spirit,” Principal Michael Woodlock said. “We respect our kids’ rights, but feel there are more appropriate places for politics.”
So, what about their decision to not only facilitate the walkout but let their message stay on the rock for 16 weeks? Woodlock said that the decision to allow that had been made to honor Parkland students “who went through a horrific event” … through facilitating an expressly political event. Attached to national walkouts which were tied explicitly to gun control. Ah, sophistry.
Wilson told Blue Lives Matter that Vice Principal Arena had admitted that the decision was political when he said he told the students that “they might have let it slide but the #NRA kind of pushed it over the edge,” even though Arena allegedly insisted to another student that “if we had written ‘protect the First Amendment,’ they probably would have done the same thing.” Right. Which is why pro-gun walkouts have garnered little political attention compared to the thoroughly-astroturfed National Walkout Day and March for Our Lives.
Even though a recent study found that younger voters don’t tend to view gun control much more favorably than the average American does, we’re incessantly told by the media that there’s a deluge of young people who loathe the Second Amendment. Their coming, we’re told, will be the death of the constitutional right to bear arms.
Why are we fed this narrative even though the evidence for it simply isn’t there? Probably because anybody who dissents from it finds their views whitewashed — in the case of these students, literally.
