As I’m sure everyone is aware of at this point in time, a tragic school shooting took place in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead and many more traumatized. Since then, many of the shooting survivors have become vocal advocates for gun control, appearing on national news channels such as CNN and ABC News.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media have not treated this tragedy with the respect it deserves, instead opting for using this tragedy and its survivors in order to push their anti-Second Amendment agenda. Frankly, I find this moral grandstanding and shaming of Second Amendment defenders as a sickening and immoral political ploy.

Let me preface this by saying that every empathetic and decent person who knows about this appalling shooting mourns and grieves for those who were gunned down. No one with a moral bone in their body wouldn’t pray for the families of the victims and those who were fortunate enough to survive. I’m also not going to get into the gun control debate seeing as how tired and unproductive that discussion has recently become (and if I’m being 100 percent honest, I’ve never heard one good argument against the Second Amendment). That being said, using a calamity, especially one as egregious as a school shooting, to prop up a political narrative has become overwhelming commonplace in the mainstream media.

The media has a history of using tragedy to push their narratives. One must only look up the debates that were held after shootings such as Sandy Hook or Orlando to see this tactic in use. Media talking heads like Piers Morgan or Van Jones will use the untimely murders of people, especially children, to push for vague gun control policies and bans. The talking heads pushing for more and more gun control will imply or sometime outright claim that because someone like Dana Loesch or Sheriff David Clarke wants to preserve the Second Amendment that they must not care about the victims.

This disgusting tactic was blatantly displayed by CNN last week when they held a Florida town hall meeting with the survivors of the Parkland shooting who favored gun control in attendance. This town hall looked less like an exchange of ideas and more like the Two Minutes Hate scene from George Orwell’s “1984.” People in the crowd would jeer at Sen. Marco Rubio, cheering loudly whenever one of the shooting survivors said that people who support the NRA are “against children.” Given CNN’s track record of dishonesty and scripting debates, I wouldn’t be surprised if they stuffed the audience with leftists and/or scripted the questions that were asked by the Parkland survivors.

I have no problem with these Parkland survivors voicing their opinions on gun control. Every American has the right to speak their mind. What I don’t want is for these victims to be used as some sort of platform or crutch for the blatantly anti-Second Amendment media or leftist politicians.

If these teenagers want to toss their hat into the political discussion, they should be just as vulnerable to criticisms as everyone else. As callous as it may sound, a person does not become some sort of expert on firearms or immune to criticism when they survive a shooting. I don’t become an expert on drug policy just because someone high on PCP attacks me behind a Cenex.

If the victims want to make political statements, that’s great, but they should not be immune to criticisms. The survivors should be comforted and the dead should be mourned, not used as a soapbox for idiots like Don Lemon to rail against every American’s Constitutional rights.