As student activists walked out of class Friday morning, they did so demanding passage of a gun control requirement that the Parkland school shooter fulfilled in order to acquire his gun.

CNN reports that the students walked out for numerous gun controls, one of which was universal background checks.

It is important to realize that the U.S. adopted background checks on retail gun sales in 1998. In fact, it is illegal to buy a new or used firearm at retail without passing such a check. Universal background checks are the same, exact checks we have now – they simply apply to private sales as well as retail. But a background check is a background check.

And guess what? Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz passed a background check for the rifle he used in the February 14 attack. Yet students are walking out to expand the point-of-sale scenarios in which other would-be gun buyers must pass the same check Cruz passed.

Moreover, CNN reports that students walked  out in support of a ban on bump stocks. But bump stocks were not used in the Parkland shooting. In fact, bump stocks have only been used criminally once–the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas attack.

The students also walked out for “waiting periods” on gun purchases – he same waiting periods that already exist in California, where Elliot Roger shot and killed three on May 23, 2014, in Santa Barbara; Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 in San Bernadino on December, 2, 2015; Albert Wong shot and killed three at the Yountville Veterans home on March 9, 2018; and Nasim Aghdam shot and wounded three at YouTube headquarters on April 3, 2018.

The students are also demanding the legal age for buying a long gun be raised to 21, that firearm confiscation orders be enacted, and that “high capacity” magazines be banned.

Efforts to ban “high capacity” magazines are misplaced, at best. School gunmen do not gain an advantage via magazines that hold more rounds but via the fact that schools are gun-free zones where defenseless targets are sitting ducks for a lunatic armed with any kind of firearm, regardless of round capacity.

 

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.