Deborah Guebert’s letter on national student demonstrations concerning school gun deaths (appeared in April 7 edition of The Gazette) makes for interesting reading. I appreciated some of her statistics on dangerous and/or unhealthy habits of today’s youth.

Unfortunately, those statistics are irrelevant to the premise of her letter – that we cannot trust youth campaigns to cut down on gun violence, especially in schools. Essentially, she claims the nation’s massive youth rallies following February’s Florida school massacre are fraudulent – for two reasons.

1) She believes it’s impossible for such a campaign to be “student led.” According to her thinking, they’re being used by …? Unfortunately, she doesn’t name the culprits. Instead, we can affirm the campaign is validated as “vision led” and “youth empowered.” We dare not underestimate or ignore such authentic demonstrations.

2) Guebert then seems to say because some youth are guilty of “sins” such as driving distracted; not wearing seatbelts; or can’t find Broward County on a map, then youth as a whole cannot be trusted to have strong moral and rational concerns about today’s critical issues. I strongly disagree with such reasoning.

Youth have challenged us to curtail the tragic gun deaths of too many students. That issue is so important that wisdom and conscience demand that we avoid the sloppy thinking and “fogging the issue” tactics found in Guebert’s letter.