Former Pennsylvania Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum said this morning that the students who survived the February 14th shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School should learn CPR instead of marching to change gun laws:
Former GOP Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Sunday that students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, should’ve responded to the massacre of their classmates by “taking CPR classes” instead of “looking to someone else to solve their problem.”
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Santorum was arguing gun laws wouldn’t make schools safer on their own when he made the comments, and said the students should instead focus on ways to help respond to a mass shooter instead of advocating for tougher laws.
“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 [so] that you can actually respond to that?” he said during a panel discussion.
Santorum’s comments came a day after hundreds of thousands of people, including high school students from around the country, protested at the March For Our Lives in Washington and at satellite marches around the country. Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School organized the march to advocate for stricter gun control laws.
Santorum went on to suggest that “phony gun laws” wouldn’t keep students safe.
“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?,’” he said. “Instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.’”
I’m not exactly sure what CPR has to do with the gun debate unless Santorum is suggesting that a school full of CPR-trained students could have somehow saved the lives of students whose bodies were riddled with high-speed bullets fired by the AR-15 that Nikolas Cruz used in the shooting last month.
