The national movement for common sense gun control is continuing to gain momentum in the aftermath of last month’s rampage at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead and a number of others injured. Advocacy efforts led by the survivors of that massacre culminated at least in part in yesterday’s “March for Our Lives,” which featured a demonstration for gun control in Washington, D.C., that was coupled with affiliated demonstrations across the country.
As the movement for gun control continues to gain steam, those advocating for “gun rights” also have been amplifying their voices. One such individual is former Republican member of the U.S. Senate Rick Santorum, who is apparently utterly desperate to remain relevant in the wake of his miserable failure of a 2016 presidential campaign — a failure that came four years after his failure in the 2012 presidential election.
Last year, he joined CNN as a political commentator, and during an appearance on this week’s State of the Union, he offered some comments about this weekend’s March for Our Lives that proved just how desperate he is to make people care about his name again.
According to the repeatedly failed presidential candidate turned cable news panel placeholder, the young people who demonstrated for gun control this past weekend should — wait for it — learn CPR instead. According to the vertebrate turned NRA shill, the responsibility for addressing school shootings rests with — wait for it — America’s students. He would rather the children of America deal with possibly bleeding out classmates than actually support the hacks who make up the GOP doing something.
He said:
‘How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations so that when there is a violent shooter, you can actually respond to that.’
Evidently he missed the point of the March for Our Lives, which is to seek to keep there from ever being a shooter in a school in the first place.
He went on to lob even more personal attacks at the American young people who are trying to keep violent armed criminals out of their schools, saying:
‘They didn’t take action to say how do I, as an individual, deal with this problem. “How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?”‘
Watch him talk below.
Here, Santorum employs an argument that’s already been popularized by gun advocates, stating that responsibility for school shootings rests with the young people who weren’t “nice enough” to the shooter.
His logic is self-defeating, because if in his world, there’s effectively no way to stop there from being school shooters, since gun control is supposedly meaningless, then why is it all of a sudden the fault of the kids who supposedly weren’t nice enough to the attacker when someone kills people in a school? He can’t have it both ways.
His logic is on the same level as that of conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, who whined on Twitter that Saturday’s demonstrators weren’t actually marching “for” anything, even though the whole event was literally called the March FOR Our Lives.
The recent March for Our Lives that Santorum, Lahren, and others have such a problem with is not the only public expression of the common sense gun control movement to take place recently.
On the one month anniversary of the Parkland shooting, for instance, students across the country walked out of their classrooms for 17 minutes to push for new gun safety regulations.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
