Students give a gun lesson

America is due for a powerful civics lesson Wednesday as high school students across the country mark the one month anniversary of a mass shooting at a Florida school by walking out of class for 17 minutes _ one minute for each victim.

The planned walkout has sparked a national debate of its own. Adults who believe in the students' call for safer schools and stronger gun control have supported what is shaping up to be a potent, poignant moment in America's debate about guns. Those who share the National Rifle Association's radical views on the Second Amendment typically see the students' exercise of their First Amendment rights _ free speech, assembly, and the right to petition government for a redress of grievances _ as a threat to their perceived right to bear virtually any gun they want, no matter how dangerous the proliferation of the most powerful of those weapons has proven to be to society.

The students, too, have already gotten a civics lesson of their own, in political hypocrisy. Their teacher is President Donald Trump, who days after the shooting pandered to a group of them in the White House, promising to stand up to the NRA and fight for tougher gun control, only to back off after gun lobbyists had a meeting of their own to set him straight.

The president who had declared that he, unlike members of Congress, was unafraid of the NRA, was brought to heel by a lobbying group that poured $30 million into his campaign, and by its power over the Congress he scoffed at. With his retreat, he now proposes only the most innocuous of actions, while touting the NRA's and gun industry's reckless, self-serving theory that the answer to mass shootings in schools is to arm teachers _ more guns, that is, to deal with too many guns already.

A few others, fortunately, have shown more spine. In Florida, state lawmakers and the governor pressed forward with a package of gun control measures, albeit a modest one that nonetheless drew the NRA's wrath.

Closer to home, in Saratoga Springs, the city council at last banned gun shows at City Center. It's a symbolic step in a state that already has some of the nation's toughest gun laws and tightest constraints on gun shows, but still an important statement about the need to rethink this country's worship of guns in the face of too many deaths.

What's needed, of course, is strong federal action, including a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks for all gun sales. That, however, is going to take time.

In the meantime, though, supporters of such measures can't allow the gun lobby and its obeisant political allies to achieve what they always seem to: to run the clock until the horror over the last massacre in a school, theater, mall, church, nightclub or open-air concert fades and Congress gladly changes the topic.

That's a lesson the students who walk out in protest seem to have already learned. By their action, they keep the memory of the dead _ and a vital cause _ alive.

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