(08-14-2019, 09:04 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: Why is Parkland considered so much more important than Columbine?
It may be more critical to the debate on massacre weapons.
The school administration had showcase students capable of eloquent lamentations of their losses of good friends. At Sandy Hook, the only people who thought like adults were the teachers and administrators. 16-to-19-year-old kids can act much like adults if brilliant. An 18-year-old with an IQ of 140 (and this is an elite public school, so that could be a significantly large proportion than the average) van be very adult.
The school administration let the students do the talking to the news media, which is an unlikely (and risky) thing to do under most circumstances because very few K-12 students are capable of such. In most cases it would be wrong. In this case those students were the right ones to express grief at senseless death. The students surely needed parental consent for doing so, but some of the parents knew what they were doing when they gave permission.
The kids interviewed did very well. But these kids sound more like the sorts who become physicians, attorneys, college professors, and research scientists than most.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.