Gerald Herbert/AP Photo Soapbox Our Children Deserve Better Than This The survivors of the Parkland massacre are take action to stop mass shootings. Will we let them down, again?

Andrew Cohen is senior editor at The Marshall Project, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a legal analyst for CBS News Radio.

We are leaving our children a planet doomed by climate change and a nation saddled in debt and deficit with an economy that is widening the gulf between rich and poor. We are leaving them a country where it is becoming harder for citizens to vote and where our drinking water is becoming less safe to drink. We are leaving them all of this, and more, and the worst of it is that the only ones we are leaving it to will be those lucky enough to survive the relentless gun violence that takes the lives of over a thousand of our children each year. Five years after Sandy Hook, nearly 20 years after Columbine, what Garry Wills memorably called “our Moloch” is still our Moloch; we still sacrifice our children to the Gun God.

So much of what we witnessed this past week in South Florida has become familiar to us, from the initial shock of the news to the helicopter views of the campus to the eyewitness accounts of survivors to the grief of the parents to the grim body count to the terse announcements by overwhelmed law enforcement officials to the trite expressions of remorse from complicit politicians. And always in that parade of horribles there is the grief and the frustration and the anger and the senseless of it all. This week’s shooter, for example, reportedly managed to get off 150 rounds with his AR-15, a weapon he lawfully purchased in the same society that deems him too young, too immature, to order a beer.


But the aftermath of the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland was different from all its tragic predecessors in one sense. For once, the sorrow and rage offered by adults immediately was drowned out by the wrath and the reason of their children. No longer willing to be sacrificed for some hoary constitutional theory, one surviving student after another, born in the shadow of Columbine, from the moment of the attack and for days afterward, relentlessly and courageously called out their parents and their politicians and their president for failing to do what every child has a right to expect from all of us every day: protect them from danger.

These teenagers, our children, blasted President Donald Trump and state and federal lawmakers on Twitter and on television, for the uselessness and hypocrisy of the “thoughts and prayers” some politicians lamely trot out still when these massacres occur. These kids, these eloquent kids, stared straight into cameras, like professionals, to deliver their blunt message: Get your acts together, stop posturing and pretending gun violence is a problem that cannot be solved, and come up with new policies that could keep just one more American family from having to bear the unbearable burden.

Children, students, like David Hogg, who said just hours after the attack: “We are children. You guys are the adults. Work together, come over your politics, and get something done.” A student journalist, Hogg had the presence of mind, incredibly, to interview his fellow students while they all were cowering from the gunman. Those raw interviews are more important to the debate about guns in America than any pontification from a Second Amendment zealot or the craven politicians who enable them.

Hogg wasn’t alone. There was Guillermo Bogan, who railed against the gun industry. “Some people will just do anything for a dollar,” he said at a vigil for the victims. “There should be a background check—are you mentally ill or are you not mentally ill?” And there was “Carly,” who tweeted in response to a particularly odious commentator. “I was hiding in a closet for 2 hours. It was about guns. You weren’t there. You don’t know how it felt. Guns give these disgusting people the ability to kill other human beings. This IS about guns.”

The nation turns its lonely eyes to eloquent victims in moments like these. But there are countless other child victims and survivors of gun violence whose voices are no less eloquent but which aren’t amplified by cable news shows and the crush of media coverage that comes from a mass shooting like this. Kids like Kavan Collins, of Chicago, who at the age of five already has been struck twice by a bullet. Or students at Excel Academy in Baltimore, where at least seven students have been murdered in the past 16 months. Or little boys like Chris Hill, in Cleveland, shot in a drive-by while he rode in the back of his mother’s car. Or kids trying to grow up in Wilmington, Delaware, which leads the nation in teenager shootings.

Their stories, like the stories from Parkland this week, coalesce to make meaning of the statistics that are hard to understand in the abstract. The truth is, something equivalent to the mass shooting we just experienced happens every day in America. Every day in this country of guns and madness and talking heads arguing over the Second Amendment about two dozen children, our kids, our neighbors’ kids, our grandkids, are killed or wounded by guns. That figure comes from 2015 statistics, the most recently available. Anyone want to bet against the notion that the figure only got worse in 2016 and 2017?

Sometimes it’s a mass shooting. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s the brutal reality of the dangerous neighborhoods we refuse to fix. Every day a Columbine. Every day a Parkland. Every day a Virginia Tech. Thoughts and prayers and candlelight vigils and long-form news coverage when the body count gets high enough. Maybe a local news report or two when it’s just a single child gunned down on a street. Maybe nothing when a kid finds his parent’s gun and accidentally shoots himself in the head. The survivors of these senseless acts have a right to be as angry as the teenagers who survived Parkland this week.

Our children deserve so much more than we have been able or willing to give them. And more and more now, recognizing our futility, our shameless ineptitude, they are giving us warning that they intend to fix what we cannot. I hope they can. As quickly as they can. And that when they do, they have the grace to forgive the rest of us for failing them so often in so many corners and classrooms of the country.