From author John Scalzi at Whatever:
A few thoughts on the March For Our Lives, in no particular order:
1. I personally didn’t expect it to be as large as it turned out to be, with 800,000 protesters in Washington DC and hundreds of thousand more (at least) across the country. There were even several hundred marchers in Dayton, the largest city near me:
Dayton #marchforourlives https://t.co/RLTBjJLTwY pic.twitter.com/OxkfnTnKE8
— Steven Saus (@uriel1998) March 24, 2018
I had honestly thought the school walkout earlier this month was going to be the crescendo of the protests. Clearly, this shows what I know. If there were indeed 800k marchers in DC, it’s one of the largest one-day protests in history, and that’s not chicken feed.
2. And it’s also clearly terrifying the NRA and its selected quislings, who have been reduced in the last couple of days to mocking the teenagers at the center of the protests, because nothing makes grown adults look more in control than making fun of children half to a third their age, whom have lost friends and schoolmates due to gun violence. What makes them angrier is that the kids are having none of it; I suppose when you’ve seen your friends murdered, being mocked by an NRAtv apparatchik or a Twitter “personality” is not nearly as devastating as those latter folks would hope it is.
The NRA was clearly hoping to do what it’s always done, which is to ride out the immediate outrage until it was over, with the tried-and-true one-two punch of “thoughts and prayers” and “it’s too soon.” But again, the kids weren’t having it, and unfortunately for the NRA, a bunch of well-spoken, laser-focused teenagers with a legitimate grievance regarding gun violence plays better than a bunch of screaming, angry guntoters who want to sell the idea the way to solve the problem of people shooting up schools with assault rifles is to force teachers to arm themselves.