OUT: POLICE ARE RACIST AND TRIGGER HAPPY. IN: “Guns are for the police and the government,” a 13-year-old girl confidently assured me.

Plus:

t wasn’t just these three—from what I saw and heard at the rally, dying in school was a remarkably ubiquitous fear among young people. I spotted a little girl, perched on her father’s shoulders, waving a sign bearing the text “Am I Next?”

Marissa, a teenage girl from Michigan, told me she felt unsafe in school, and thought more security would help. Teenager after teenager testified that their fears of death were all-consuming, ever-present, and more justified than ever before.

Missing from these conversations was any awareness of a very basic, indisputable fact: Gun violence has declined precipitously over the past 25 years, and most Americans are much safer today than they were a generation ago.

Schools are no exception. They are “increasingly free of mass shootings,” according to researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel. . . .

Obviously, it’s understandable for the survivors of the horrific events in Parkland to be feeling unsafe, given what happened to them. But mass shootings are not the norm, and kids don’t need to be terrified of going to school.

Actually, they do need to be terrified — if they’re to be put to proper political use by the Democrats.