The March for Our Lives: Emphasis on the “Our”
By Mack Miller
With the growth of a new youth-led movement manifesting in front us around the need for an end to school shootings, we must not be afraid to deliver criticism. In fact, if it is a movement we truly care about, our criticism is absolutely necessary and should come from a place of love rather than bitterness and hatred. So whose lives are we marching for when the demands include stronger state repression and criminalization of mental health? Whose lives are we marching for when the language used around access to guns means that policemen and military are deserving of gun access but not citizens? Ultimately, this march and these demands uphold the white supremacist capitalist structures and the school shooting victims have been co-opted by the liberal establishment that is in power. Nothing is new.
This is certainly not an attempt to dismiss the absolute tragedy and trauma the Parkland high school students have been experiencing but to have deeper and more rooted effects in preventing more children from experiencing any form of gun violence based trauma and tragedy. The Parkland high school students are making incredible strides, but some of the language and policies they are advocating for could potentially incite more violence long term.
“Civilians shouldn’t have access to the same weapons soldiers do.” the Parkland students pen, starting off their first demand in a guest edit published by the Guardian. Why should soldiers have these guns as well? In a video made by Vets for Gun Reform, a gun reform advocacy group, that was supported and applauded by Parkland High school students, veterans discuss the near striking similarities between their service guns and AR-15s. A veteran goes on to say “In fact, they’re identical.” The language and rhetoric used on gun restrictions for citizens places American imperialism as an a priori. What is the justification around the American military using the guns they are advocating American citizens not to have access to? In no attempt to undermine the deaths of school shooting victims in America, the American military has systematically killed civilians in incomparable numbers. It is not a march for their lives, the lives of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and every country America has “intervened” in throughout history. Now more than ever, Americans must hold a strong international lens to our social justice and activism if we truly want to be free. Our country has committed more violence than any other institution in human history.
The third demand written by the Parkland students states, “Change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement.” The police have a long and ugly history with mentally ill people. For instance, in 2015 nearly a quarter of all people who were shot and killed by police were considered mentally ill by their communities and family members. Poverty and mental health have a deeply rooted relationship with poverty often being the source of the trauma that facilitates mental illness. Mental healthcare is often times a huge opportunity for people struggling financially and a gateway into a better life. To criminalize and deepen police presence within this healthcare system would be putting some of the most vulnerable people in our country at risk of police brutality just for the sake of a small population the country has misdirected anger at.
The problem of school shootings is patriarchy and white supremacy, not mental health. If we are going to march we must march for everyone’s lives, people of color, people in the third world, and mentally ill people.
