The safest country in the world

The intrepid teens, survivors of a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, have released the schedule of their July tour through Texas to Nevada and nearby states. Along the way they will register voters and urge them to vote. They also have a website with their ten legislative demands.

1. Fund gun violence research. A couple decades ago Congress banned the CDC from doing such research. Restart it.

2. Eliminate absurd restrictions on the ATF, including allowing them to digitize records.

3. Universal background checks.

4. High-capacity magazine ban.

5. Limit high-powered weapons.

6. Fund intervention programs, those that have evidence-based violence reduction strategies.

7. Extreme risk protection orders. Remove guns from a person in crisis.

8. Disarm all domestic abusers.

9. Gun trafficking. There are no federal laws to prevent criminal networks from flooding a community with guns.

10. Safe storage and mandatory theft reporting. An estimated 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured guns.

David Hogg, one of those Parkland teens, wrote an editorial for Rolling Stone. Here’s a bit of it. The nasty guy said at this years NRA convention that the Second Amendment is under siege. Hogg replies:

By this line of reasoning, the only way to keep your family safe is to turn your house into an armory. The sad part is, that messaging works: Stockpiling has increased by about one hundred million guns in the past decade. If more guns made us safer, the United States, with over 340 million guns – more than the total population of the U.S. – would be the safest country in the world. But the President has it all mixed up; the Second Amendment has us under siege.
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We are nothing but school kids pitted against the most powerful lobby in the country. The NRA and politicians that are funded by them are being exposed; the young people can see through the lies that we’ve been force-fed for years.