The weapons are similar too
Teens and college students across the country protested the war in Vietnam not just because of disagreements over U.S. foreign policy. Their lives were on the line. Or their brothers’ or their friends’ or their husbands’.
Hundreds of students, parents and teachers protested against gun violence inside the Tennessee state House on April 6 for the same reason. Lives are on the line. Theirs and friends’ and their kids’. We watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in a Monday press conference hold back tears after friends were shot and one killed in a mass shooting at a bank in Louisville. How long will these daily shootings go on unchecked before each of us is personally affected the same way, if not shot ourselves?
Hope for our democracy and for an end to the daily slaughter may lie with the young. This is their Vietnam. Ironically, the weapon of choice in many of these shootings is a variant of those the Pentagon sent in bulk to Southeast Asia 60 years ago.
CNN:
Worry and fear about gun violence are widespread in the United States, where most families have been affected by a gun-related incident, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Nearly 1 in 5 adults has had a family member killed by a gun, including in homicide and suicide. About as many adults have been personally threatened with a gun, and about 1 in 6 adults has witnessed an injury from a shooting, the survey found.
The new report comes less than a day after a shooting that claimed at least four lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Mass shootings have escalated in recent years, reaching a record pace in 2023. There have been at least 146 incidents so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, leaving more than 200 people dead and hundreds more injured.
About half of all gun-related deaths are suicides, federal data shows. And the suicide rate has also recently increased, reversing years of decline and returning to near-record levels.
Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman see the parallels in younger activists taking up the fight (Washington Post):
Catalyzing events in U.S. history have a tendency to shape generations of public officials. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the GOP’s depression economics gave rise to the New Deal Democrats. Racial and cultural repression in the mid-20th century spawned classes of lawmakers fighting for the “rights revolution.” In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and Watergate inspired the antiwar “Watergate babies” to run for Congress.
The Republicans’ reactionary turn against democracy, against women’s rights, against minorities of all kinds, and against efforts to stop gun violence in red states is “is beginning to shape a new generation of young Democratic officials, many of whom will one day be the party’s leaders.” It cannot happen too soon.
“We’re seeing this across the country,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run For Something, which recruits progressive candidates for state and local office. “It’s no coincidence that some of the loudest voices pushing back are young leaders in red states, often from urban environments, often people of color, often LGBTQ themselves.”
Last week, after the GOP-controlled state legislature in Tennessee expelled two young Black lawmakers for protesting gun violence, and after a Texas judge invalidated federal approval of abortion medication, Run For Something’s candidate recruitment spiked. Litman says more than half the new candidates are from red states.
What binds these lawmakers and candidates together is an acute sense that the character of the country is on the line and it could determine their own futures. “For them, every part of this conversation is personal,” Litman says.
Especially bullets headed their way.
Most of the opinion piece is about the fight by the young against MAGA revanchists determined to put everyone they don’t like back in their 1950s (or earlier) places. But seeing the marchers in Nashville on Monday brought back memories of how deadly serious, and how personal, protests were against the Vietnam War. Mass shootings provoked these new Tennessee protests. People are afraid. Afraid enough to do something about it.