Not The Onion. Not snark. He really went there.
CNN commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested students protesting for gun control legislation would be better served by taking CPR classes and preparing for active shooter scenarios.
"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," Santorum said on CNN's "State of the Union."
This is one of those times that someone’s mic should be cut and they go to a commercial. Come on, man. Is the GOP so married to their guns, so in debt to the NRA, that they have to come up with “CPR classes” to save lives, instead of reasonable gun laws? Rhetorical question, there’s no need to answer.
Van Jones, a liberal CNN commentator, interjected and mentioned his own child was about to start high school.
"I want him focused on algebra and other stuff," Jones 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."
I’m not sure why they felt they needed to specify that Van Jones is a liberal CNN commentator. They could have gone with reasonable, or sensible, or decent, or any number of adjectives to describe someone who feels that teaching kids how to try and save people who have been shot is a better idea than trying to make it harder for kids to get guns in the first place.
"I'm proud of them," [Santorum] said. "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 gonna solve it. Phony gun laws don't solve these problems."
There it is. Back to that old “gun laws don’t stop criminals” approach. If laws don’t stop criminals from breaking the law, then why do we have laws in the first place? Again, rhetorical question.
It wouldn’t be so bad, either, if I wasn’t fairly sure that at least 30% of the general population would agree with him. Protect my guns, not their children.