David Hogg Gets Upset When His Rights Are Taken Away Because of One Person
It’s usually difficult not to feel sympathetic for the survivor of a mass shooting. David Hogg has somehow, sadly, managed to accomplish this difficult task.
Whether it’s through debasing the national conversation about guns and gun safety, pretending that surviving a shooting makes him a bona fide public policy expert, allowing himself to be politicized in the most cynical of ways, using victimhood as form of naked self-promotion or doing so in the most confrontational and obnoxious way possible, Hogg has established himself not just as an enemy of Second Amendment supporters but of civilized debate.
This isn’t to say that he’s wrong on everything. Like a number of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, Hogg is upset that the Broward County Public Schools’ superintendent’s solution to stopping violence is taxpayer-supported clear backpacks and school ID badges, as he made clear during a gun control forum Friday.
However, Hogg isn’t against it just because it’s dumb (although it is dumb).
He’s against it because — get this — it violates his constitutional rights.
“One of the other important things to realize is many students want their privacy,” Hogg said. “There are many, for example, females in our school that when they go through their menstrual cycle, they don’t want people to see their tampons and stuff.”
“It’s unnecessary, it’s embarrassing for a lot of the students and it makes them feel isolated and separated from the rest of American school culture where they’re having essentially their First Amendment rights infringed upon because they can’t freely wear whatever backpack they want regardless of what it is,” he continued.
“It has to be a clear backpack. What we should have is just more policies that make sure that these students are feeling safe and secure in their schools and not like they’re being fought against like it’s a prison.”
Do you think this is a hypocritical statement?
Wait — so constitutional rights aren’t negotiable in order to keep people safe? Or it’s just certain ones? I’m confused.
As I write this Saturday morning, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of people — teenagers, mostly — lining up in the streets for the March for Our Lives, an event dedicated to anti-gun hysteria, a hysteria that has been whipped up in part by both Hogg and Everytown for Gun Safety, an astroturfed group started by Michael Bloomberg that believes the Second Amendment to be roughly as important as a discarded Kleenex.
On Saturday, these people will march so that legislators will do something, anything about guns. This will likely involve legislation, if passed, that could abrogate people’s rights under the Second Amendment. There’s no indication it’ll make a difference. But it’s in the name of safety.
Meanwhile, Hogg is being asked to wear a clear backpack in school. He says “(i)t’s unnecessary, it’s embarrassing for a lot of the students and it makes them feel isolated and separated from the rest of American school culture where they’re having essentially their First Amendment rights infringed upon because they can’t freely wear whatever backpack they want regardless of what it is.”
But you don’t really need that backpack, Mr. Hogg. What kind of American needs a backpack made out of opaque material? Your need to express yourself surely doesn’t override my need for safety.
Oh, and by the way, unlike the kind of gun laws Everytown thinks it can push, invasive school safety measures — metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, school uniforms and public school restrictions like those — have all mostly sailed through the courts.
The great irony here, however, is that David Hogg is only interested in constitutional protections when it affects his backpack. When it’s other people’s stuff, he’s not so interested. That’s not how the Constitution works. It was put together to protect the rights of every American, including rights that may be temporally unpopular.
And while I don’t agree with Hogg that the clear backpack idea is unconstitutional, I agree that it is useless, wasteful and distracting. Just like almost everything he and his cohort are proposing.
What do you think?
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