The Washington Post
Alex Horton 3 hrs ago
© Noam Galai/WireImage Emma Gonzalez attends March For Our Lives on March 24, 2018 in Washington, DC. Having teenagers act as figureheads for a movement has a certain quality that has not gone unnoticed in the wake of the March for Our Lives rally on Saturday.
Judge too harshly, and you are attacking a kid who has balanced trauma with homework. Amplifying students such as Emma González has injected optimism among liberal activists in the grinding debate about the role of guns in society.
González, 18, has been at the flash point of this dynamic, appearing in newspapers, on magazine covers and in a prominent spot at the anchor rally in Washington, where her speech, which included a prolonged silence, lasted as long as the six minutes it took a gunman at her high school in Parkland, Fla., to kill 17 people on Valentine’s Day.
Gun-control advocates have held up González as a figurehead of the movement, splashing her trademark shaved head on T-shirts and viral images.
Then, there is another viewpoint of her activism.
A doctored animation of González tearing the U.S. Constitution in half circulated on social media during the rally, after it was lifted from a Teen Vogue story about teenage activists. In the real image, González is ripping apart a gun-range target.
The doctored image mushrooming across social media appeared to confirm the belief among Second Amendment absolutists that calls for stricter gun-control measures are sacrosanct, destroying the very foundation of the United States. The animation bounced around conservative Twitter before it received a signal boost Saturday from actor Adam Baldwin.
He tweeted to a quarter of a million followers with a hashtag reading “#Vorwärts!,” the German word for “forward” and an apparent reference to the Hitler Youth, whose march song included the word.
