Rick Santorum on Sunday criticized students organizing for gun control, saying they wanted “someone else to solve their problem” with legislation.
During a panel discussion on CNN, the former Republican senator and current CNN commentator said “Hollywood elites and liberal billionaires” had funded the gun control marches that took place Saturday and told politically-active students to, “instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that– where there is a violent shooter.”
Trauma surgeons explained in the wake of the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School — the catalyst for the recent nationwide, student-led calls for action — that wounds from high-velocity bullets like those delivered by alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz’s AR-15 are much more difficult to treat than those from handguns.
“The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively,” Dr. Heather Sher wrote in the Atlantic of one Stoneman Douglas victim whose CT scan she saw, and whose injuries proved to be fatal.
“How are they looking at other people?” host Brianna Keilar interjected. “They took action.”
“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” Santorum said.
“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 students should articulate “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.’”
Indeed, one common theme of students’ protests is that they follow adult lawmakers’ failure to act in any meaningful way to regulate gun ownership.
Fellow commentator Van Jones mentioned his son, who he said is about to start high school.
“If his main way to survive high school is learning CPR so when his friends get shot he can keep– That, to me, we have gone too far,” Jones said. “I’m proud of these kids. I know you’re proud of these kids, too.”
“I’m proud of them but I think everyone should be responsible and deal with the problems that we have to confront in our lives, and ignoring those problems and saying they’re not going to come to me, and saying some phony gun law is going to solve it– Phony gun laws don’t solve these problems, that’s what we found out,” Santorum responded.
Watch below via CNN:
