The worst news they have received since their parents told them to work in the summer." The conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza has greeted in these terms the refusal of members of the Republican Party of the Florida Congress to debate in the Chamber the sale and possession of semi-automatic weapons, such as the AR-15 with which Nikolas Cruz, 19 He murdered 17 people at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Institute on Wednesday. An institute that is, precisely, in Florida.
The target of D'Souza's mockery are the survivors of the massacre: 3,000 teenagers who saw how Cruz - who had been expelled from the center for violent behavior and had a history of violence - murdered them with his AR-15 and then I was going to have a drink. They are people like Anthony Borges, 15, who is recovering in a hospital in Florida with five bullets: three in the legs, one in the back, and another in the hip.
What is not so clear is that neither the mockery of D'Souza nor the blockade of the Florida Congress will stop with this strategy what is becoming a spontaneous movement. And, on top of that, in an election year in which the Republican Party, which in principle had everything in its favor to renew its majority in the US Congress, faces a certain danger of an electoral hecatomb. Because, for the first time in decades, there is a segment of the population in the United States that seems unified to demand control over the indiscriminate sale of firearms: Generation Z, that is, those born between approximately 1997 and 2007.
It is not a politically active group. In fact, many of its members can not even vote: they are teenagers, who seem tired of having their elders explain that they have no right to complain when someone is shot at the entrance of the school and a stray bullet leaves them in a chair of wheels for life or, simply, directly into the institute to kill them, as Cruz did. Those teenagers, high school students from all over the US, went out on Wednesday to express their rejection of the arms sale. But the key date is March 24, when a massive demonstration is being held in Washington, which has the support of some top celebrities, such as film director Steven Spielberg, actor George Clooney, and the star of television Oprah Winfrey, who have announced that they will donate $ 500,000 ($ 400,000) each. It is the March for Our Lives, organized, precisely, by the survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Institute.
The movement is spontaneous. And, as such, it has been greeted with skepticism, if not insults, by many commentators, particularly Republicans in rural areas, where support for the National Rifle Association (NRA) is concentrated, the group Conservative and white that defends the elimination of all restrictions on firearms.
The March for Our Lives has already been linked in social networks to the financial financier George Soros - the beast of Trump followers and, also, of Vladimir Putin - and accused of making professional actors happen as survivors of the massacre on Wednesday . Even so, adolescents have already achieved that, for the first time in 24 years, the US government has taken a measure to control, even minimally, the weapons that circulate in the streets. It was Tuesday, when Donald Trump banned by decree "all the devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns".
The irruption of this spontaneous movement in the political panorama can change the relationship of forces in the first world power. American public life is controlled by the 'baby boomers', the generation born between 1945 and 1960, and to which Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders belong, and, depending on when the end of that cohort is established, Barack Obama . The next two generations - the 'Generation X' and the 'Millennials' - have little weight in public life, despite the fact that they represent half of the population. And the same thing was supposed to happen with Generation Z. Until Nikolas Cruz arrived and started killing people. Whether this reaction becomes a movement or the elections of November 2018 can not depend. And maybe until the presidential elections of 2020. Because the movement has started in Florida, one of the decisive states in US politics. The country with a 72-year-old adolescent president now has his political life pending with the real teenagers.