Stop Trying to Shame Stoneman Douglas Kids for Posting About the Shooting on Social Media

Before police even had a chance to clear out the bodies from yesterday's horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, right-wing hack and conspiracy theorist Mark Dice took to Twitter to post a predictably bad take.

"Someone want to tell the Generation Z kids that in the event of a school shooting, they should call 911 instead of posting a video of it on Snapchat," he wrote, between posts yelling at CNN and blaming mental health problems for the bloodshed.

It didn't take long for Dice to see a backlash — including from Stoneman Douglas students themselves, who were actually inside the school when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz unleashed a torrent of gunfire from an AR-15, killing 17 people.

17 people are dead. 17 of my classmates. This is how you fucking respond? How much of a heartless dick do you have to be to tweet something like this. And btw as we were running for our lives we were calling 911 to the point that they told us not to anymore. https://t.co/MQWae1mGwv

— sarah (@chaddiedabaddie) February 14, 2018

Dice deleted his tweet, without any acknowledgment whatsoever of the criticism, and then went back to his regularly scheduled programming — blasting YouTube for using Valentine's Day to "promote identity politics" and the "white privilege hoax."

Tweets live forever, though, and screenshots of Dice heartlessly snarking on teenage mass-shooting victims are (rightfully) preserved for posterity. 
But he wasn't the only one to jump on social media to shame Stoneman Douglas victims for posting about the shooting. Scattered across Twitter are posts proclaiming that the end times are here because terrified kids used their cell phones to tell the world what was happening at their school.   

When a generation interacts with one another almost exclusively through a 5-inch screen, it's not surprising that humanity gets lost.
It's not the guns. It's the iPhones. It's Snapchat and Facebook.
My highschool friends all had gun racks in their trucks. #Florida#Parkland

— Eric Watkins (@ericlwatkins007) February 15, 2018

These are dumb things to say. Of course, authorities need to be the first to know of a shooting. But according to at least one student, they had already called 911 repeatedly. Law enforcement was already very much aware of the situation at Stoneman Douglas and working to reach the barricaded students.

Additionally, the videos students took inside the school can become evidence in the case against Cruz. In fact, the FBI is already actively seeking photos and videos from the massacre.

Social media, like it or not, is a way of communicating — especially for this generation — and how students shared what they were witnessing.

My 15yo daughter, watching the #parkland Snapchat vids on #msnbc #inners @chrislhayes last night, said, quietly, "That's their last chance to say goodbye." Don't try to tell these kids what matters, @MarkDice. #GunControl #GunControlNow #fucktheNRA https://t.co/U2T77issDy

— Tiger Lilly But most important, after years of inaction from Congress as shooting after shooting violently snuffs out the lives of second-graders, concertgoers, and now teenagers, the latest victims are the last people in the country who should be shouldering any of the blame.