In the two weeks since the slaughter of 17 students and adults in Parkland, Fla., not much has changed in the way the country regulates guns. Anyone who could buy an assault rifle on Feb. 13 still can today. And yet, even with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, the ground seems to be shifting in the direction of gun safety advocates who have been stymied for years. Whether this shift will last and what its long-term impact will be remain unknown. But the movement that began among the teenage survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which hopes to bring as many as a half-million marchers to Washington next month, has become the latest in a long tradition of movements for social change that have transformed the politics of issues that were once seen as set in stone, from slavery to the casual acceptance of sexual harassment.
In the wake of the massacre at Douglas, the grassroots activists are giving a jolt of momentum to gun-safety advocates and putting the National Rifle Association on the defensive. Even if Congress punts on the gun control issue for the rest of the year, the speeches, marches and protests at state capitals in recent days are having an undeniable effect. Even states that have long opposed any gun control measures, such as Florida and Vermont, are actively considering new restrictions on firearms. Not since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term, when the Brady Bill restricting handgun sales and an assault weapons ban were enacted, have gun control advocates experienced a time so promising for legislative action.
From Columbine, Colo., in 1999 to Newtown, Conn., in 2012 to Las Vegas last fall, mass shootings have done little to move the needle on gun control measures. Liberals proposed modest restrictions, and the NRA, with the backing of the Republican Party and some red-state Democrats, prevented them from being adopted. But this time seems different. The students are media-savvy, articulate and have effectively seized the moral high ground based on their first-hand experiences of the terror. They are highly sympathetic and dogged. They have joined the slipstream of activism that was touched off in Newtown, the culmination of anger built up over years of random massacres by assailants who had no business getting their hands on assault-style rifles. The latest young assailant had had numerous brushes with law enforcement and with mental health professionals, had raised alarms with neighbors and acquaintances specifically threatening to shoot up a school, and yet he slipped through the system and was able to buy a weapon designed to kill maximum numbers of people.
For these reasons, the growing pressure applied by student activists has appeared to pierce the NRA’s once-invincible political armor. Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican who represents the adjacent congressional district to the north, an Army bomb technician in Afghanistan who lost both legs in combat, endorsed a list of gun control measures including a ban on assault weapons, putting him at odds with the NRA. Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who has an A+ rating from the NRA, has also broken with the organization, announcing his support for raising to 21 the minimum age to buy a rifle. Even President Trump has grudgingly committed to a ban on bump stocks (an accessory that turns semi-automatic rifles into machine guns) and floated the prospect that he might support some other modest gun control policies. In 2016, Trump had run for president as the NRA’s most vocal supporter and a loud defender of the Second Amendment.
source: yahoo news