Last week, a 19-year-old gunman named Nikolas Cruz walked into a high school in Parkland, Florida, and shot 17 people dead. Then he ditched the gun, left in the ensuing chaos, and managed to get off to Walmart to browse for an hour or so and then went to McDonald's before finally getting picked up by the police. The response from US President Donald Trump has been a selfish one, as he's made it all about himself and Russia and the collusion and the FBI probe that he desperately wants to end.
Trump is making Florida shooting about him
The survivors of the Florida shooting are unhappy with this, since the debate should be about guns and gun control and the victims of the shooting and their families and how we can prevent things like this from ever happening again (but as long as there's a Republican Party, these school shootings will continue to take place every couple of weeks).
For once, it's not about Trump, but he doesn't see it that way. Barack Obama wouldn't be handling the situation this way. Remember how emotional he was after Sandy Hook, and how desperately he pushed gun control afterwards? Now, the students in Florida are telling Trump to "HAVE A DAMN HEART." No one ever had to say that to Obama.
If Barack Obama was still the President (oh, imagine how wonderful that would be: how blue the sky would be, how green the grass would be, how fresh the flowers would smell), he would be bringing the American people together and giving his sympathies to the victims and their families and preaching peace and calling for harder gun control laws. Trump is not doing that.
He's making it all about him and the students who survived the massacre are mad as all hell about that.
This is post-Columbine America at play
Ever since Columbine, the schoolchildren of America have been much more educated on the gun laws and the dangers of angsty teenagers being armed with automatic weapons. They know now that this isn't normal and they shouldn't go to school every day expecting the place to get shot up and they shouldn't be able to joke about which of their classmates will be "the one" to do a school shooting, as they did with Cruz in the months leading up to his actual shooting.
These kids in Florida are literally saying, "We don't deserve this," and calling on their government to do something about the gun laws in their country. Tighter restrictions on gun ownership would prevent pretty much all of the mass shootings in America – just as it did in every other country where they've done this, including the UK and Australia – and even kids know this, so why the hell don't the elected official in Congress know this?
And especially since Trump became the President of the United States, teenagers in America have been more annoyed at Congress for not doing anything about the gun laws – at least Obama was trying. Trump is quite content to let anyone who wants a gun have a gun and do whatever the hell they want with it and shrug any mass murders off as "the price of freedom."
17-year-old high school student more mature than the President
A 17-year-old student who survived the shooting has gone on an NBC news program to tell Trump that, in his role as the President of the United States, "You're supposed to bring this nation together, not divide us." This is the key problem with Trump's Presidency. He seeks to divide America further, rather than mend those divides.
He appeals to one half of this divide, while the other half despises him. But that's not the job. That's not the office he's taken on. When a 17-year-old high school student is more intelligent and mature than the President of the United States, you know there's something seriously wrong.
