Poll: For the Columbine generation, gun violence is a defining fear

[DonViejo]

Source: USA Today



Susan Page and Marilyn Icsman, USA TODAY Published 5:00 a.m. ET March 22, 2018 | Updated 8:18 a.m. ET March 22, 2018

WASHINGTON — The threat of mass shootings is the defining fear for the generation that has grown up in the shadow of Columbine, a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds. Now more than one in three young people nationwide say they plan to join the March For Our Lives protests on Saturday in person or via social media.

The survey of 13- to 24-year-olds — including more than 600 middle-school and high-school students — shows both the depth of anxiety that school violence has fueled and the way a movement has spread across the country in the weeks since a rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., left 17 people dead.

On Tuesday, another school shooting in Great Mills, Md., left the alleged shooter dead and two other students wounded.

“I watch over my shoulder because you never know,” says Justin McDonnall, 17, a sophomore at North Central High School in Hymera, Ind., who was among those polled. Even in his small town, which he describes as being in “Nowhere USA”, police officers spent two days at his school to deal with verbal threats of gun violence that a fellow student had made. With the marches, he said, “We’d like to be heard, and not just ignored.”


Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/03/22/poll-columbine-generation-gun-violence-defining-fear/441446002/

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[beachbum bob]

1. the MIC establishment has sold fear for decades so we americans must outspend most of the

civilized world on defense to "keep us safe" and the NRA has been the civilian wing of the same, selling fear for the profits of the gun industry. I never realized how cowardly so much of america are as they clutch their AR15s and bibles

[flibbitygiblets]

2. This is heartbreaking. Children shouldn't have to live in fear like this.

Not to mention how it impacts their actual education.

[qwlauren35]

3. This is real.

I was talking to my 15-year-old niece in Annapolis, MD a few weeks ago, before the MD shooting, and she was saying how real the fear is, and how the kids at her school are concerned because they have an open campus, and they feel that the threat is compounded by the fact that so many kids are outside in between classes, and there is no security at the school entrance.

I cannot imagine such a life. To wonder if some nut-job is going to open fire any day, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.

What has our country come to when there are young people who think that the solution to a problem is to kill somebody. Taking away guns is only a piece of the solution. There needs to be a major paradigm shift, a belief that life is sacred, that nothing is worth killing over, that there are peaceful solutions to every problem.

Making guns less accessible to teens and young adults may only be reasonable if you have hope that a more mature American will find other ways to deal with his problems.

[TheFrenchRazor]

4. deaths that occur in mass shootings are a minuscule fraction of the total # of homicides/year;

there is no reason that policy should be driven by mass shootings, as horrible as they are.