At last night’s CNN town hall, teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting looked power in the face and held it accountable. They had tough questions for Senator Marco Rubio and the NRA’s Dana Loesch, neither of whom acquitted themselves particularly well. Via CNN:
The students-turned-gun-control advocates, their teachers and parents asked frank questions of Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson and Rep. Ted Deutch about whether they would support banning certain assault-style rifles and refuse to take money from the NRA. “We would like to know why do we have to be the ones to do this? Why do we have to speak out to the (state) Capitol? Why do we have to march on Washington, just to save innocent lives?” asked senior Ryan Deitsch, his voice rising with each question.
Asked directly by a survivor if he would refuse further donations from the NRA, Rubio dithered, saying only that “people buy into my agenda.” (Rubio has received an A+ rating from the NRA and took $9,900 from the organization for his 2016 re-election campaign.) Loesch, meanwhile, deflected questions and at times resorted to conspiracy theories, citing the Puckle gun and the Belton flintlick gun as evidence that semi-automatic rifles existed during the passage of the Second Amendment. The Belton gun never actually existed. The Puckle gun required a crew to operate it, and it never entered mass production.
Loesch and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel also repeatedly blamed people with mental illness for the United States’s disproportionately high rate of mass shootings. Loesch decried the “mentally unfit” and Israel argued for expanded police power to involuntarily commit people with mental illness. Gun rights advocates have found their scapegoat, but fortunately for all of us, Parkland isn’t buying it.