George Pyle: The next generation already has the weapons of the future — and knows how to use them

Every time there is a mass shooting, some ignorant yahoo will suggest that the problem is that victims didn’t have the means to fight back. They argue that the problem in our society isn’t too many high-powered guns in the hands of too many unbalanced thugs, but not enough firearms lying about within reach of teachers and principals and lunch ladies.

That is, of course, absurd to the point of being obscene.

There is little doubt that, if we tried that on a wide scale, there would be a time or two when it would work. A good guy with a gun would, indeed, stop a bad guy with a gun. Sometime. Somewhere. And there would be much rejoicing.

But, much more likely and much more frequently, there would be instances of those school-issue guns being stolen, misfired, used in a lover’s quarrel or an angst-ridden teen’s suicide. But those victims would come in ones and twos — hundreds of them, but ones and twos — and so wouldn’t get noticed by CNN or the White House.

There is a means to fight back, though. And young people are increasingly showing us what it is.

We don’t have to issue these weapons, or train people how to use them, or worry too much that they might get stolen, misused or go off at the wrong time. Because most American teenagers already have these in their pockets, and their skill at using them is amazing.

Better, these tools can also be turned on another threat to the United States, those Russian trolls, bots and their weapons of mass deception that, it appears more and more likely, may have tilted the last presidential election to our own Russian troll.

It’s a smartphone — like an Apple iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy. And the ammo it carries — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

The generation that has grown up with these gadgets is the same generation that has grown up with active-shooter drills and shelter-in-place lockdowns in schools. Those phones not only have been a means of official communication of threats and of all-clears, they also have been a means for those hiding in their schools, in real fear of imminent death, to record their actions and feelings and reach out, for what may be the last time, to parents and other loved ones.

Like this video recorded during the shooting by a student reporter who contributes to The Sun-Sentinel in Florida.

Real-life, real-time experiences should do a lot more to impress upon the nation the pain and scarring that are carried even by those who weren’t actually shot. Much more so than after-the-fact, and media-filtered, accounts.

And, after the most recent school shooting, it appears that more students are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore.

One student of the terrorized high school in Parkland, Fla., used her Twitter account to talk back to the president of the United States.

“I don’t want your condolences you f---ing price of s---,” she tweeted (though she used letters, not hyphens), “my friends and teachers were shot. Multiple of my fellow classmates are dead. Do something instead of sending prayers. Prayers won’t fix this. But Gun control will prevent it from happening again.”

There were others. Including this response to one of those “It’s too soon” tweets.

They are holding rallies, speaking confidently to television networks and planning mass demonstrations and a nationwide student walkout — #StudentWalkout — on April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre. All of it is bolstered by their ability to communicate among themselves without any need for adult authority figures to facilitate — or opportunity for them to intervene.

This one’s pretty good, too:

Yes, these are the same weapons used by the Russian troll farm that special council Robert Mueller just indicted for illegally trying — and perhaps succeeding — to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Which shows that there is no weapon — explosive or electronic — that cannot be misused.

Some are also media savvy enough to seek the attention of legacy media, starting at the top:

— Don’t Let My Classmates’ Deaths Be in Vain — Christine Yared | For The New York Times

But real mass communication, where consumers are creators and the wisdom of the crowd at least stand a chance at being self-policing and winnowing out the trash, is different than the spread of lies and hate through the Russian misinformation campaign.

That campaign just used modern tools — cheap and targeted — to carry propaganda messages, often swallowed whole, regurgitated to the like-minded, all the while hiding from the kind of real mass dissemination that would allow allegations to be checked and lies to be called out. It was the online manipulation of the Fox News generation, not that much different from Archie Bunker talking back to his TV, except that instead of challenging anything he heard, he just repeated it a thousand times, with no real intelligent interaction.

There is hope — or, at least, there had better be hope — that the generation that is native to smartphones and social media will, rather than being manipulated and mesmerized, stand up, push aside the dead weight of their elders, and demand the world we have so far been unable, or unwilling, to give them.

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, is actually kind of handy with his trusty iPhone 5S. For an old guy. gpyle@sltrib.com. Twitter: @debatestate

Related:

— America’s kids can — and must — fix our gun fixation — Jeffrey Salkin | Religion News Service

— President Trump, panicking, reveals the depths of his awfulness — Jennifer Rubin | The Washington Post

— Why Facebook is afraid of Mueller — Anne Applebaum | The Washington Post