If you look hard enough, you can find people protesting virtually anything.
Most of the time, no one pays any attention. A couple of people standing on a street corner protesting McDonald’s prices these days isn’t exactly newsworthy in a lot of places, even if they have a point. It’s not news because it’s so small.
But apparently, news is slow in Las Vegas.
Why do I say that? Because this protest by UNLV students actually made the news.
Acoalition of UNLV students and community organizers decried gun violence Tuesday morning near the site of a campus shooting that killed three professors in December.“
Today we are here not to recount that dark day,” said Imer Cespedes-Alvarado, founder of the Youth Voice of Nevada, which organized the event.
“Instead, we stand before you to bring on the courage to demand accountability and asserted action from our elected officials,” said the 21-year-old student.
Standing in Pida Plaza on Tuesday, Cespedes-Alvarado said that on Dec. 6 he had to shelter at UNLV’s Student Union after a gunman opened fire in the business school next door.
The group of about 20 people held signs criticizing Gov. Joe Lombardo for what they said was his failure of advancing gun control laws he vetoed during the last legislative session.
The enrollment at UNLV, in case you were wondering, is 30,660 students.
In other words, not even 0.1 percent of the student body participated in this “protest.”
They’re upset because Lombardo didn’t sign a bill seeking to restrict gun rights for legal adults under 21, one that would bar guns within 100 yards of a polling place, and one that would bar gun ownership of anyone who committed a hate crime in the last decade.
Of course, absolutely none of them would have prevented the UNLV shooting in the first place as none of them applied to the killer.
I suspect that most students at UNLV, if they even bothered to look at the complaints, recognized that these were simply things anti-gun students wanted and they were just trying to use the shooting as a pretext for their wants. That would be an accurate summation, to say the least.
Yet that’s how most anti-gunners are.
What we see is:
- Tragedy happens
- People mourn tragedy and ask what could be done to prevent it
- Anti-gunners push variety of legislative initiatives that all deal with guns that they’ve wanted for years before, but could never get through.
- People recognize this as stupid and refuse to play along.
- Anti-gunners lose their minds because lawmakers opposed measures that wouldn’t have stopped tragedy, but they should have because of the tragedy.
We’ve seen it play out like this a thousand times.
What’s new, though, is the complete lack of agreement by the student body who couldn’t even be bothered to show up to offer support. Columbia University has about 6,000 more students and they had an order of magnitude more people show up to support antisemitism than these twits could get to support gun control
And this is what constitutes news in Las Vegas, apparently.
Like I said, it must have been a slow news day in Sin City.
