As the fallout continues regarding the Valentine’s Day shooting in which 17 people were killed in Parkland, Florida, movie star Bill Murray offered his spin on the ongoing demand for stricter gun control. No surprise: He loves the students. Writing online, the actor claimed that “the kids” from Stoneman Douglas High School are reminiscent of “the students that began the end of the Vietnam War” decades ago.
Listed under the NBC News “THINK” banner of “fresh opinion, sharp analysis and powerful essays” to “help readers interpret and evaluate the world and their place in it,” Murray is quoted as stating:
I was thinking, looking at the kids in Parkland, Florida, who have started these anti-gun protests, that it really was the students that began the end of the Vietnam War.
It was the students who made all the news, and that noise started, and then the movement wouldn't stop.
Murray then added: “I think, maybe, this noise that those students in Florida are making -- here, today -- will do something of the same nature.”
“We are living in interesting times,” the comedian also noted, when “people are becoming politically activated who weren't previously.”
Continuing his comparison of today’s protesters with those who criticized the Vietnam War, Murray added: “You've got to surround a deeply political issue like gun control or a war, to come at it from every single direction. You can't just focus on one thing or aim for just the one goal.”
“Ending the Vietnam War was not a simple thing, either,” he continued. “You had to make sure that all our people were safe; we had to make sure that they were as safe as you could be.”
“And, you might remember, people thought it was going to be the end of the world if we lost Vietnam,” Murray stated. “But that war had to stop.”
As a result, the actor continued, Vietnam is now “one of the most wonderful places to go in the world. People love going there; they love the people.”
He then added: “And we all survived: they survived, we survived. People will survive. If you can just stop shooting at them, they really do pretty well.”
Murray then asserted: “It's the right idea for a human to live in peace, and a peaceful nature is a proper thing.”
However, for children “to be concerned about going to school, worried about what could happen to them at school, that makes for a horrible moment,” he said. “It's just a horrible place for us to be at.”
At that point, Murray referred to what he considers the strongest tool in a young person’s arsenal: idealism, which he described as “a voice that’s inside of you, it’s your conscience.”
“The thing that's so powerful about students is that, when you haven't had your idealism broken yet, you're able to speak from a place that has no confusion, where there is a clear set of values,” the comedian asserted.
“That can really deteriorate along the way, depending on the road that you follow,” he added, “and it can become almost dysfunctional, but it's there.”
“Everyone has it. Sometimes it's just a whisper, but, in some people, it's a shout,” he concluded.
At the end of the article is a bit of text that states this opinion was “told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.”
It is no coincidence that this item appeared just days before the March for Our Lives, which was set to take place the following day, March 24, at 12 noon on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
At press time, there was no indication that Murray would attend the march, but it would certainly be no coincidence if he did.
