By Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.

“I hear a lot of quiet in this room, and I sense your anxiety. And you should be anxious, and you should be frightened.”

Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association CEO and top shill for the U.S. gun industry, noticed the silence during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22 and attributed it to the audience’s fear of a socialist uprising.

Or, following yet another mass shooting at a school, could it be that they found his signature fearmongering tone-deaf and uncomfortable?

One hundred and one people have been massacred in three mass shootings in less than five months, and LaPierre’s audience may feel less sanguine than he does about protecting ready access to military-style weapons that can be reloaded in seconds with 30-bullet magazines.

The public has viewed disturbing videos of the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School shared on social media by traumatized survivors. National audiences have listened to the students’ anguished voices as they tell their stories and lash out at Congress for not protecting them.

In a human body, a bullet from a typical handgun leaves a straight line. A high-velocity bullet from an AR-15 leaves a catastrophe. One radiologist, Heather Sher, described a student who had so little of their injured organ remaining that there wasn’t anything left to repair, and doctors were helpless to prevent the student’s death.

The surviving classmates are Wayne LaPierre’s worst nightmare. They are old enough to speak for themselves. They’re not backing down, and they’re forcing our leaders to answer for their record on guns. With their First Amendment rights, the students are confronting unreasonable protection of Second Amendment rights.

The students aren’t LaPierre’s only problem. Two of his arguments for guns in schools now have gaping holes in them.

After Sandy Hook, LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

There was a good guy with a gun at Stoneman Douglas High School. A military veteran, Scot Peterson, was a sheriff’s deputy and school resource officer who arrived at the school during the shooting and never went in. Surveillance footage shows he stayed outside for four minutes as people inside screamed and 17 kids, teachers and coaches were brutally murdered.

LaPierre’s argument about that has always bordered on fantasy, and he can’t duck what happened here. His “good guy” argument failed to pass muster in the long-range sniper situation in Las Vegas last October as well.

Secondly, LaPierre is a proponent of youth firearms training. The shooter reportedly excelled in an air-rifle marksmanship program that the NRA supported with over $10,000 in non-cash assistance in 2016, when the boy was a varsity member. A fellow cadet in the JROTC program described shooting as “almost therapeutic” for the assailant. The NRA unwittingly helped train a killer.

Up until Ash Wednesday, the shooter was a responsible gun owner. He legally bought an AR-15 at age 18. He legally purchased high-capacity magazines for it.

LaPierre’s defense of “freedom” has made it so we are all free to lose our children in mass murders at movie theaters, concerts, nightclubs, churches, schools, military bases, civilian workplaces, etc. It could happen here in Freeborn County as it already happened at the Red Lake school and Accent Signage in Minneapolis. Just 30 miles north, Waseca may have caught a school shooting in the planning stages. My kids are potentially sitting ducks every time they go out to recess at Hawthorne, as were the elementary children in Stockton, California, in 1989.

LaPierre offers a false choice — we either accept this reality and address it with more guns, or we are bound to live in a dystopian socialist regime. This is lunacy, and it’s killing our kids.

If it weren’t for the glowering intransigence of the NRA, we could already have a dozen common sense laws in place to lower these risks. We can’t end gun violence, but we can reduce it. We can make it tougher for people to easily copy what far too many shooters have already done.

These assailants aren’t “cowards” or “evil.” They are angry, disaffected and lost. They are almost always boys or men. There are a variety of solutions, and they don’t involve arming English teachers.

This discussion is not really about freedom as LaPierre tries to frame it. The gun industry manipulates male insecurities the same way the beauty industry manipulates female insecurities. Both generate huge profits, but the marketing of guns has reaped far more deadly results, with far less liability.

It’s time to face this truth, and students are leading the way. No civilian needs that much firepower. We accept reasonable limits on the First Amendment for public health and safety. We must do the same with the Second Amendment. We must be the responsible adults in charge.