Parkland Student Emma Gonzalez Says ‘Go Join the Army’ if You Want to Shoot an AR-15
Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez has a message for assault weapons advocates: “Go join the Army if you want to have fun shooting off a weapon, and serve your fucking country.”
Gonzalez made the fiery remarks Thursday at the national seminar of the Education Writers Association in Los Angeles where she spoke alongside her peers about gun reform in the wake of a series of mass shootings throughout the country.
“It’s just cheaper to take away the guns that aren’t imperative to living in America,” she argued. “You don’t need an AR-15 to protect yourself in bed from a robber at night.”
Gonzalez, who lived through the February massacre at her Parkland, FL high school were a fellow student shot 17 people dead with an AR-15, has become a household name for gun control, along with her peer David Hogg.
During the discussion, Hogg remarked on widespread gun violence in Chicago, sometimes used as a counter-argument to reform by those who claim harsher laws wouldn’t prevent daily shootings there.
“It’s almost like they’re using Chicago and these different places as case examples and they don’t want to do anything there because they want to be able to point to that and be like, ‘Look, gun control doesn’t work,'” Hogg said, adding that “the reason it doesn’t work is because it’s not at a federal level.”
Near Hogg sat Alex King, a student from Chicago familiar with his city’s ongoing struggle against shooting deaths. For King, the problem seems unnoticed.
“We in Chicago, you really don’t hear about it, we don’t have school shootings, we have daily shootings,” he said. “Like they said, we need the gun laws on a federal level because in Chicago we have some of the strictest gun laws. But what does that mean when you can go literally, like, to your next door neighbor Indiana and go to Chuck’s and get one, and be back in Chicago in less than 30 minutes to fire it off?”
King also spoke at this year’s March For Our Lives, the Washington, D.C. rally where students gathered to speak out on gun control.
To hear the panel, watch the clip above.
[Image via screengrab]
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