The day after hundreds of thousands of students and their supporters marched across the country and the world to advocate action on gun violence, Rick Santorum told CNN that they might as well give up now.
“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 that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?” the former Republican senator suggested on State of the Union.
He went on to dismiss the “action” taken by the student activists who survived a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month as little more than asking someone else to pass a law.
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“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?’” Santorum said. “Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s how I’m going to help the situation,’ instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.’”
But as CNN’s Van Jones pointed out, it is ultimately up to lawmakers, not students, to pass laws to protect them. Speaking of his own teenage son, he said, “If his main way to survive high school is learning CPR so when his friends get shot—that to me, we’ve gone too far. I’m proud of these kids. I know you're proud of these kids too.”
Santorum responded by saying he is “proud” of the students, but in the next breath criticized them for believing “some phony gun law” is going to prevent the next school shooting. “Phony gun laws don’t solve these problems,” he said.
More than using the march to try to convince lawmakers to change their views, the student activists have said the main goal is to encourage voters to show up at the polls for the midterm elections this fall.
As one Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student told The New York Times this week, if politicians in Congress do not act on guns following the march,“I’m going to vote them out of office. And so is my entire generation. And they’ll be sorry then.”
