Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Despite the sunshine that fills Southern Oregon these last days of summer, it feels like we’re living in a darkly satirical novel about the near future, when mass shootings have become so frequent that they are part of the daily routine. Every week or two, these past months, there’s been another slaughter, occasionally more than one on the same day. The next day, we repeat our preferred responses—”What was the motive?” “Is this domestic terrorism?” “We need more background checks!”—then prepare to do it all again, and again, and again.

This August, a grassroots movement of young people—led by survivors of the Parkland High School shooting, the deadliest school massacre in United States history unveiled their “Peace Plan for a Safer America.”

Determined and audacious, they propose a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, a national licensing and gun registry, a mandatory gun buyback program for assault-style weapons, and a vigorous licensing system. They address not only mass shootings, but also other horrors they know firsthand: domestic and community violence, and suicide.

The students call their group “March for Our Lives.”

“We’re setting goals that push the conversation farther than it ever has, farther than any lawmaker has ever had the courage to,” said Tyah-Amoy Roberts, who was a senior at Parkland High School at the time of the shooting.

“Even if you don’t believe that there is a political appetite for an assault weapons ban,  I guarantee you that there’s a political appetite for peace,” said 19-year-0ld David Hogg, another Parkland survivor and a co-founder of March for Our Lives. 

Hogg has it right. According to the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey:

• 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 
• 76 percent support “red flag” laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 
• 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. 

Yet the political will to act is deeply missing. Our lawmakers have much more appetite for ending violence in Afghanistan than they do for ending violence at home. 

Like many others of my generation, I cut my activist teeth 50 years ago, in the movement to end the Vietnam war. At 21, I carried my rage and sadness to the Boston Common, joining 100,000 chanting students and other protestors to demand an immediate end to that war. In cities and towns nationwide, that moratorium drew more than two million demonstrators.

“Let’s stop saving face and begin saving lives,” said Senator George S. McGovern, urging immediate withdrawal at the Boston rally. “To those who say this will cause a bloodbath in Vietnam, I say there is a bloodbath now.”

Public opinion on Vietnam was turning our way, just as current polls about gun violence are turning now. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 56 percent of Americans favored withdrawing our troops from Vietnam. By September 1970, the same number thought we should bring home all troops within a year, and in 1974 we accomplished that. 

At the time, I believed that vociferous young people like me had pushed and won the argument. Years later, I realized that in fact our adult allies tipped the scale. 

Leaders from politics, academia, entertainment announced their opposition to the war. Working men and women raised their voices, and so did parents with sons of draft age, labor and religious networks, and veterans whose lives had changed unalterably.

Where are the adult allies for today’s young people, 21^stcentury warriors for peace? 

The selfishness of baby boomers has rightly drawn criticism. We seem to lack what psychologist Eric Erikson called “generativity”: the desire in middle age to contribute to the next generation, beyond one’s family.

Now I see a chance for us to step up. By sharing our wealth, skills, and influence, we too can contribute to the rising generation’s actions to end gun violence. 

We can open our wallets to these young activists. And we can stop writing checks to candidates or organizations against gun control, or those that lack the courage to take a stand. 

In letters to news organizations and elected representatives, in public forums and conversations with friends, we can call attention to the “Peace Plan” of March for Our Lives. If they say that plan cannot succeed, we can reply, “Prove these young people wrong.” 

We can demonstrate alongside youth, as did the 50 “Grannies for Gun Control” who joined March for Our Lives’ 2018 rally in Washington D.C.

We can also eschew cynicism about the power of stricter gun laws. In a recent Gallup poll, one-third of young respondents believed it was possible to completely prevent mass shootings. Of voters 65 and older, only 10 percent agreed.

Gun deaths must have no place in America. Like our Parkland High School survivors, we should say that, loud and clear—wherever we live.

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