Gun grabbers love to seize the opportunity given to them by mass shootings. They know that emotions run high and they want to capitalize on that. This is especially true following a school shooting.

Why else would the media push a child’s opinion on policy like this?

A student who survived the Florida high school shooting is pleading with Congress to take action to prevent another mass shooting. “Please, this is the 18th one this year. That’s unacceptable. We are children. You guys are the adults,” David Hogg said during an interview on CNN. “You need to take some action and play a role. Work together, come over your politics and get something done.” Hogg said that the fact that there have been so many school shootings “is a testament to where this country has come.” “We need to dig out of this hole. We need to step out of it and take a look back and realize there’s something seriously wrong here,” he said. “And some of our policymakers … need to look in the mirror and take some action because, ideas are great, but without action, ideas stay ideas and children die.”

Of course, Hogg’s numbers are misguided. All these supposed school shootings? They’re almost all the product of someone manipulating the definition to artificially increase the number of incidents.

As Stephen Gutkowski noted at the Washington Free Beacon last month, a number of these supposed shootings are nothing of the sort.

This broad definition places two separate suicides, a January 9 incident where a man shot a BB gun at a bus window resulting in no injuries; a January 10 incident where a student in a criminal justice club accidentally shot a peace officer’s real gun at a target on a classroom wall instead of a training gun resulting in no injuries; a January 9 incident where gun shots were fired from somewhere outside of Cal State San Bernardino, which struck a building on campus without injuries; and other incidents next to the murder of a Winston-Salem State University student at a nightclub on the Wake Forest University campus, the January 22 shooting of a 15-year-old at a Dallas-area high school, and Tuesday’s Marshall County High School shooting which left 2 dead and 18 others injured.

In other words, the actual number of shootings is incredibly inflated.

But Hogg can be forgiven. He’s a high school kid. He most likely isn’t even old enough to vote.

So why is he getting a platform?

The answer is simple. He gets the platform because he’s saying the right things at the moment and he can pull on emotions. He’s a survivor, so his words somehow have extra weight. They shouldn’t, but they do.

Let me ask the people applauding one thing, though. Would his words have any meaning if he attacked welfare or social security? Would you applaud him if he bashed Obamacare or single payer healthcare?No? Then why should anyone listen to what he has to say about guns? I’ve already shown that all he’s doing is regurgitating numbers he read somewhere without doing any actual research, so why is he the voice of a generation already?

He’s not.

Hogg is a kid who went through something horrific. Nothing more, nothing less. His opinions on policy don’t matter any more than my neighbors in the grand scheme of things, so stop pretending his survivor status gives him more expertise.

All you’re doing is embarrassing the kid and the media as a whole.