Editorials of The Times

As surely as there are camels’ backs and straws to break them, moments arrive when citizens say they’ve had enough, when they rise up against political leaders who do not speak for them and whose moral fecklessness imperils lives. We may be witness to such a moment now with the protests by U.S. teenagers sickened — and terrified — by the latest mass murder at the hands of someone with easy access to a weapon fit for a battlefield, not a school.

These kids have had enough. They’ve had enough of empty expressions of sympathy in the wake of the sort of atrocities they’ve grown up with, like last week’s mass shooting that took 17 lives at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Enough of the ritualistic mouthing of thoughts and prayers for the victims. Enough of living in fear that they could be next in the cross hairs of a well-armed deranged killer, even with all the active shooter drills and lockdowns they’ve gone through. Enough of craven politicians who kneel before the National Rifle Association and its cynically fundamentalist approach to the Second Amendment.

They are asking in what kind of country are children sent off to school with bulletproof book bags strapped to their backs — capable, one manufacturer, Bullet Blocker, says, of “stopping a .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, 9 mm, .45 caliber hollow point ammunition and more.”

“I was born 13 months after Columbine,” a 12th grader named Faith Ward said Monday, referring to the school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, the dawn of the modern wave of school shootings. Ward spoke to a television reporter at an anti-gun demonstration outside her school in Plantation, Florida. “This is all I have ever known,” she said, “this culture of being gunned down for no reason, and this culture of people saying, ‘Oh, let’s send thoughts and prayers’ for three days, and then moving on. And I’m tired of it.”

So are we all.

It is too soon to tell if this righteous anger augurs a sustained youth movement for gun sanity, going beyond the occasional protest. We hope it does. It’s time, once again, for America to listen to its children. Who among us have more at stake than they?

Sensible young people have it in their power to make their senseless elders take heed — and act. We saw it happen during the Vietnam War half a century ago. Young people, initially reviled by establishment forces as unwashed, longhaired traitors, energized an anti-war movement that swept the country and, even if it took years, ultimately ended America’s misguided adventure in Southeast Asia.

To be effective, any movement needs a realistic program, not mere emotion. Otherwise, it risks coming and going in a flash with little to show for itself. A tighter federal system of background checks is a start, to better monitor would-be gun buyers with mental illness, for example, or histories of gun violence. Such a program should also include reinstating a nationwide ban on assault weapons — a state measure died in the Florida Legislature on Tuesday — and ending an absurd prohibition against using federal public health funds to study gun violence.

Even President Donald Trump, who told an NRA convention last April that “you have a true friend and champion in the White House,” has signaled he might be willing to improve the system. The Washington Post reported that after Trump saw the coverage of the student protesters, he asked Mar-a-Lago guests whether he should do more about gun control. On Tuesday, he ordered that regulations be written to ban bump stocks, devices that can make an automatic weapon out of a semi-automatic. Beyond that, though, it’s hard to tell if he means business when he says he’s open to more thorough background checks. Steadfastness is not a Trump hallmark.

However, if young people channeling this angry moment remain steadfast, they might not only force his hand but also stiffen the resolve of other elected officials and candidates. Horrific school shootings aside, they are vulnerable every day to gun mayhem at a stomach-churning rate. The journal Pediatrics reported last June that gunfire, each week, kills an average of 25 children ages 17 and under. A 2016 study in The American Journal of Medicine calculated that among two dozen of the world’s wealthiest nations, this country alone accounted for 91 percent of firearms deaths among children 14 and under.

What the young protesters are saying now is: Put down the guns. We’re your children.

How can anyone not heed their pained voices?

A state commission that oversees New York’s correctional system expressed an increasingly common sentiment last week when it said in a report that New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex needed to be shut down faster than the 10-year timeline envisioned by the city. The commission also threatened to shut the complex itself if Mayor Bill de Blasio fails to move expeditiously.

The report was clearly a response to what state officials see as a lack of urgency on the city’s part. But if the state truly wants to expedite this closing, it needs to do all it can to make it easier for New York City to transfer inmates to newer, smaller jails built elsewhere in the city that would be safer for both inmates and guards. Beyond that, city and state officials need to move away from the counterproductive language of mutual recrimination that will hinder this effort.

The barbaric nature of life at Rikers Island came into horrifying focus four years ago, when Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, issued a report documenting a “culture of violence” at the complex, where teenagers in particular were battered and beaten by guards who acted with impunity, without fear of punishment by city officials.

In 2015, the city ended a long-running legal battle over the conditions at Rikers, signing a court-enforceable agreement that called for sweeping changes there. The city subsequently decided to cut its losses and close the facility, which is too large and poorly designed to be safely used as a jail.

The new report from the New York State Commission of Correction said that Rikers was one of the worst jails in the state, with more violent incidents, sex offenses and disturbances than could be explained by its size, and that violent incidents actually increased between 2016 and 2017.

Most tellingly, the report said that the city’s Department of Correction has been unwilling and unable to take the needed remedial steps. In a clear slap at the de Blasio administration, the commission accused the city of dragging its feet on the 10-year proposal, saying that, even if the city had been moving expeditiously, a decade was too long to tolerate a “spiraling year to year increase of violent incidents and degrading conditions facing both inmates and staff.”

The governor’s office released the report just hours before de Blasio held a news conference to announce plans to build a new jail in the Bronx and to renovate three other facilities elsewhere in the city as part of a strategy to empty Rikers. The Cuomo administration slammed the city for adopting the 10-year plan in the first place and called the building announcement the de Blasio administration’s “first positive step” toward closing the complex.

The city argues that the timeline could be shortened by years if the Legislature expedited changes that would make the process easier. These include: changes that would speed up construction and legislation that would ensure speedier trials, reform the bail system and allow the city to give inmates who showed good behavior the opportunity for earlier release.

The city also would be helped if state parole violators were held in state prisons — as opposed to mainly in local jails — and if the state adopted a system of graduated sanctions and rewards, instead of automatically consigning parolees to jail for minor rule-breaking. The governor and legislative leaders who want to see Rikers closed quickly need to put their energies behind these proposals.