Emma Gonzalez: A Gun Range Target Morphs Into The Constitution of the United States

You can say this for the rabid pro NRA and alt right crowds in this country. When they feel threatened by anyone, even teen aged girls, they go all in with crazed social media blitzes that make the Russians look positively civilized in comparison.

On Saturday tens of thousands took to the streets across the nation to protest gun violence and America's lax laws which allow it. One of the faces of the protest in Washington D.C. was Parkland, FL Stoneman Douglas High School senior Emma Gonzalez. She has a unique perspective on the subject because on Valentine's day last month 14 of her classmates and three of her teachers were gunned down by a former student who had been able to buy an AR-15 assault style rifle as easily as he could a movie ticket.

This weekend isn't the first time Ms. Gonzalez has appeared in front of news cameras letting people know she thinks congress and the NRA are willing to let children be murdered in order to preserve their version of, The American Way. She has also been quite adamant all those, "thoughts and prayers" which are offered to the victims by both groups after each and every school massacre just won't cut it any more.

The savage campaign against Emma Gonzalez and other Stoneman Douglas students began almost immediately. First there was Florida legislative aide, Benjamin Kelly who sent emails from his government account to a Tampa newspaper claiming she and some of the others weren't high school students at all, but paid crisis actors. Just before he was fired he said his only regret was he had contacted the wrong media outlet.

Then there was a republican candidate for the Maine state legislature, Leslie Gibson. His response to Gonzalez's message was a tweet in which he claimed he'd never succumb to the wishes of a, "skinhead lesbian." Gibson, who at the time was running unopposed for the Maine seat quickly drew a GOP challenger in the upcoming primary and dropped out.

Now we've come to this. Ms. Gonzalez did a photo shoot for, "Teen Vogue," during which she was shown tearing a gun range target in half. By the time some troll using the name, "Linda NRA Supporter," got through doctoring the pictures, then posting them on Twitter, the paper target had morphed into a copy of the Constitution of the United States.

Before, the "Linda," account was suspended by Twitter, the altered photos were retweeted 65,000 times by true believers, now utterly reassured this crazy looking kid was out to destroy America. One of those vile yokels was the actor Adam Baldwin. He also retweeted the post, but this time the message went to his 250,000 some odd followers along with the added hashtag, #vorwarts.

For those wondering about this obscure reference, vorwarts is German for the word, forward, and way back when, "Vorwarts! Vorwarts!" was the title of the Hitler Youth anthem. Hey, who knew the guy was such an expert on Nazi trivia?

When confronted with news the photos had been faked Baldwin promptly declared the deliberately misleading images and his accompanying hash tag were nothing more than, "political satire."

Right.

In another widely seen photo, Ms Gonzalez is wearing a jacket with a small Cuban flag sewn onto the arm. This is probably because her mother and father, a math tutor and--you have to love it--a cyber security attorney got out of Cuba in 1968 and she is, you know, of Cuban descent.

Not so, screamed another right wing troll who posted, "Emma Gonzalez wearing the flag of an authoritarian communist nation. Makes sense. They both hate an armed citizenry!"

Just to ensure all their bases were covered, Iowa GOP representative, Steve King's campaign took her to task on Facebook. No, not for being a commie plant, but that she failed to understand both her heritage and the brutal nature of the Cuban regime her parents escaped from.

High School students not understanding the gun debate, or for that matter, anything else, is a common theme among the right wing. They are howling constantly the pupils of Stoneman Douglas and all those others are being exploited, yes, manipulated, by the liberal media and their big money backers,  the "Hollywood Elites," and George, by God, Soros himself. To prove it, FOX News has put Gonzalez's fellow student, Kyle Kashuv on the air multiple times--in a strictly non exploitative way, of course. Saturday afternoon young Kashuv solemnly informed the viewing audience the vast majority of those thousands of kids we saw in the streets didn't understand what they were marching for.

In addition, our old pal Rick Santorum went on CNN and told the audience all those young people were doing nothing other than looking for, "someone else to solve the problem." Rather than seeking some weenie socialist style answer, he said, they should be doing something specific to help themselves when it comes to school violence, like taking CPR classes.

It was a statement so devoid of intelligence and common decency it moved Dr. Eugene Gu to tweet, "Marie Antoinette: Stupid peasants, let them eat cake. Rick Santorum: Stupid students, let them learn CPR."

You know your argument is in trouble, both intellectually and morally, when you have to stoop to this sort of God awful shit. However, doing just that has never made the right wing purveyors of blatant propaganda and lies, or their raving disciples pause, much less blink.

Indeed, despite what Kyle Kashuv told a FOX panel his fellow students knew exactly why they were protesting in the streets. Here is a hint: they don't want their brains blown out while walking from English Lit to the gym simply because some crazy fuck can get his hands on a weapon that should be limited to the military.

They also know if lawmakers don't do something about it mass school shootings are going to happen again, and again, and again. The pro NRA crowd knows it too. They just don't want to admit they own part of the responsibility for the ongoing horror, nor do they want to do anything to stop the body count from growing even higher than it already is.

Honestly, evil is too kind of a descriptor for them.



sic vita est



3-26-18