The high school kids from Parkland Florida are having a profound effect on America; tomorrow, there will be over 800 March for Our Lives events worldwide, over 700 in the US alone.  El Jefe is going to the one in Houston.  To find a march near you, click here.

But that’s not all that’s happening.  The boycotts against business partners of the NRA are being effective. At least 18 companies have severed ties with the NRA.  Additionally, several large chains have established a minimum age of 21 to purchase guns.  But now even more steps are being taken by large business.  Yesterday, Citigroup announced that it will require all of its clients who deal in guns to raise its age limit to 21, do background checks on ALL gun sales, cease selling bump stocks and high capacity magazines. This policy not only applies to borrowers from Citi, but also all retailers who accept Citibank credit cards.  If clients refuse to comply, Citi will drop them.  This move have been considered more of a social statement than real, but I disagree.  If Citi has been moved enough to declare this policy, so have other banks, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.  In 2012, the NRA started “anti-gun” shaming, telling its members to boycott companies it viewed as hostile to guns.  Well, now the worm has turned, and there are a lot more of us than the NRA membership.  Companies are focused on profitability.  Normal people are now threatening that profitability of companies which are irresponsibly supporting unlimited gun ownership.

The kids from Parkland are shaming Washington, shaming state governments, shaming the gun lobby, and shaming all of us adults for miserably failing at protecting our own.  It’s our fault, and it’s long past time for us to fix it.

“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.

“Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.

“They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.”

“They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun: we call B.S.

“They say guns are just tools, like knives, and are as dangerous as cars: we call B.S.

“They say that no laws would have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that occur: we call B.S.

“That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works.” The crowd was now in a frenzy of anger and sadness, the people around me tearing up as they yelled, “We call B.S.”

And then, in unison, the people gathered began to chant, “Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out.”

Emma Gonzalez, Senior, Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida