American Secondary Education and March Madness

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By the Rev. Dr. Joe Renfro

Marches or demonstrations come from the left and from the right in America today, but most are from the left.  It is sad to see in MARCH FOR OUR LIVES that the organizers from the left are preying on school children to have them demonstrate of things they really don’t understand. It is “political activism” by intellectual conformity, seeking the applause of the crowds so as to foment political change, while neglecting or distorting greater truths, the wisdom of our founders

Demonstrations recently have been rampant throughout our land—much of it supposedly calling for things such as promoting economic equality of all, promotions of special rights for gays, special treatment for transsexuals and other so-called minority groups, and attacks on gun rights, on and on. However, we should not be using our secondary education to cultivate a type of MARCH MADNESS, in the sense of trying to foment a revolution, as most of the money behind it and the organizers are seeking to do!

On March 24, 2018 the MARCH MADNESS hit the schools in our nation. Millions of students across the country were encouraged by some government institutions, mainstream media, and even by their own school systems to walk out of class to demand the government take away the rights to bear arms. It was certainly not just demonstrations to show sorrow for the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The focus was much more what they called “gun violence.”  Madness can mean anger against, but also pure stupidity!

There is gun violence if you mean using a gun to destroy something or somebody, but there are   just as well all other types of violence. Violence does not come from an object, but from the actions of people. Violence can be displayed in an endless number of ways with any type of object from one’s mouth to one’s fist to sticks and stones to knives and bombs.  Violence is not spawned by objects, but it is spawned by responses within the psychic of human beings.

Romans 13:8-9 says: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, “YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, YOU SHALL NOT MURDER, YOU SHALL NOT STEAL, YOU SHALL NOT COVET,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”  It says nothing about “YOU SHALL NOT OWN OR POSSESS A WEAPON.”

In the Freedom Outpost, March 16, 2018 Matt Agorist wrote an article entitled “Student Suspended for Refusing to Leave Classroom During Gun Control Walkout,” concerned about a high school student was suspended after he made the choice to stay in the classroom while other students participated in the seventeen-minute walkout for gun control. The entire walkout was organized and sanctioned by the establishment and, as an incident out of Ohio shows, in one instance, choosing a side was even mandatory.  Hilliard Davidson High School senior Jacob Shoemaker proved this point when he received a suspension for refusing to leave the classroom to participate in the walkout. He felt the purpose of school was to educate, not to demonstrate, and he told the Associated Press that “School is not the place for divisive politics, and to make his statement, he chose not to take sides.” So, the eighteen-year-old was suspended!

                                                                                                                                                                    It is as fact that the situation went way beyond just allowing the students a time of public morning for those who were killed or injured.  In some schools they chose to remember the deceased students through a time of silence held for each student killed as their names were read aloud, to which it can be argued was positive.   However, there was the call that went out to all the nation of demonstrate against gun violence, but in this situation, it was not a focus on MARCH MADNESS, but rather it as on MARCH SADNESS.

There is gun violence, and there are as well all other types of violence. Violence can be displayed in an infinite number of ways with any type of object from one’s mouth to one’s fist to sticks and stones to knives and bombs.  Violence is not spawned by objects, but it is spawned by responses within the psychic of human beings.  Proverbs 3:31 gives good direction, as it says, “Do not envy a man of violence, and do not choose any of his ways.”

The students, and in particular their student-activist leaders, David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, have been reveling in a feeling of power, self-importance and pride. These students and their adult organizers are exploiting the Parkland, Florida tragedy to advance their personal agendas. The situation turned into not just a statement against gun violence, but a call for all types of restrictions to be put on gun ownership, even some calling for the confiscation of guns.

David Hogg became the front of an anti-Second Amendment campaign.

Hogg is now the “face” of the Parkland, Florida shooting, displaying the epitome of being a rude, arrogant, profane, self-centered teenage boy. His discourse was filled with all kinds of profanity and violent talk.  However, he portrayed himself as the smartest boy in the room before the cameras, and the media treated him as if he was the smartest boy interviewed. His was the male response and then there was the female response by Emma Gonzalez, who also took to the stage resembling by dress a Latin American dictator, as she wore an army green jacket with a Cuban flag decorating the shoulder.

In an article from WND it mentioned how C.J. Pearson, a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore spoke to the MARCH FOR OUR LIVES that was scheduled to be for the 24th that: “Hundreds of thousands of young people are going to take to the streets to march for gun control because they have been fed this false narrative that the Second Amendment is to be discarded, that the constitution is obsolete and that guns are inherently bad.”

Attacks on guns are very much in the contemporary world of the schools in our land. Bob Unruh in a March 29, 2018 WND article brings out some interesting observations:   

1.) Four kindergartners in Sayreville, New Jersey, were suspended from school for three days for playing “cops and robbers” on the playground during recess. The boys were found guilty of using their fingers as guns and shouting words like “bang” while running around the school yard.  2.) Three boys were suspended from Bemiss Elementary School in Spokane, Washington, for bringing to school miniature toy guns from G.I. Joe action figures. The toys were about one to three inches, but the school said it stands by its zero-tolerance policy on “weapons.”  3.) In New Jersey, a 9-year-old student was suspended from school for a day and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation after mentioning to a friend his intent to “shoot” a classmate with a wad of paper. The fourth-grader had planned to launch spitballs at the girl using a rubber band. 4.) A student who chewed his pop tart into the shape of a pistol was suspended. 5.) In 2010, a teenage female hunter in Montana faced a school hearing after she inadvertently parked in a school parking lot with a hunting rifle locked in a case inside her car trunk. 6.)  A professor at a Connecticut school sparked controversy by calling police when a student talked about the Second Amendment during a class speech. 7.) A Colorado high-school student was suspended for 10 days for having non-functioning drill team rifle replicas in her car in a parking lot at school. 8.) A Texas school threatened its students for even talking about guns.  9.) A district banished a shirt because it had the image of a gun. 10,) A student was suspended simply for advocating for the Second Amendment.  11.)  A 2008 case caught up a kindergarten student in Tennessee who had a toy weapon.

Speaking of madness, why can’t people see the stupidity of much of this?

The young man, C. J. Pearson suggested too many in his generation are making decisions based on emotion rather than logic and reason.  He went on to say that, “My message to my fellow young people is to remember what we learned in history class.”

“Remember Hitler? Joseph Stalin? Even some modern examples – Kim Jong Un and so forth and so on? The people that these regimes have oppressed I am sure would kill to have something like the Second Amendment, and I am sure that the Holocaust would have been a very different thing if those that Hitler sought to oppress had had the means to defend themselves. First they come for our guns, then they come for our liberty.”

Pearson said America has not had dictators like Hitler and Stalin come to power due to the Second Amendment.

“If any leader ever sought to plant the seeds of tyranny in this country they would be met with resistance,” he continued. “Resistance made possible by the Second Amendment. History not learned from is history bound to be repeated, and so when you sit here and argue that the Second Amendment is the worst thing to happen to America and that we need to just throw it out the window – I am going to look you in the eye and say that is B.S. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and that is a fact.”

If various forces in our nation instead of attacking ownership or possession of guns would focus on the directives of the Holy Bible and the teaching of the Ten Commandments, “THOU SHALL NOT KILL,” and to “LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF” situations like what happened at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would not be or at least not so often.

It is very sad that the progressive media is using this tragedy of the Parkland shooting to seek to create a MARCH MADNESS against gun ownership in our nation by programming the so-called innocent children to promote their own agenda!

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