Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Sunday that students who have rallied for gun control should instead learn CPR or find their own way to prevent a school shooting.
“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 Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate said students could work to stop bullying in their communities or respond themselves to a shooter instead of asking lawmakers to approve legislation to protect them.
Santorum’s comments prompted outrage on social media a day after hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their supporters rallied across the U.S. to push for tougher laws to fight gun violence.
The demonstrations Saturday were led by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed last month.
Santorum said that if the rallies are about more than politics, then the country needs to have a broader discussion that doesn’t revolve around “phony gun laws” that don’t work.
“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” he said of the demonstrators. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?
(AP)
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5 Responses
Welcome to Chelm. Why not start building hospitals next to all of the high schools in america so they don’t have to travel so far. This is similar to the clear backpacks and badges in Forida. When they bring in the guns to school in their pants, will they have to wear clear pants?! The problem is not guns, but certainly will be decreased with decreased access. The problem is not security, but will be helped by better security. The problem is that there is no value on life. Western culture is based on consumerism fed by programmed obsolescence creating a disposal society, where the only thing that matters is quality of life. Marriage is disposal and life is disposal, and the younger generation feels it. When their empty lives have meaning and purpose other than immediate gratification, virtual friends, and obsessive materialism, they will have reason to live, less anxiety, and will stop killing themselves and others. Until then, keep teaching them CPR…
Students should use CPR before and after people are shot to death.
I did not think it was possible, but Rick Santorum is giving CPR a bad name.
Apparently, Mr. Santorum thinks high-school students should take personal
responsibility for the prevention of school shootings. Good grief.
If someone CV has been hit by a couple of AR-15 bullets there’s precious little left to give CPR on. Santorum is worse than clueless – he’s plain ignorant. With people like this commenting on national news and still inhabiting the halls of Congress, it’s no wonder high school students feel they have to take things into their own hands. I lived in Israel during the terror attacks after the Yom Kippur War, and I would have been outraged if that was all the national government had said about security. The supermarket in my neighborhood had been bombed twice, people had been massacred at their breakfast tables in Kiryat Shmoneh, and high school students had been taken hostage. But at least we knew the government was on our side. I wouldn’t like to go to school every day knowing I was risking my life, and that the “grownups” were too fond of money and power to try to protect me.