Rick Santorum has admitted that he “did misspeak” in his comment that instead of pressing for stronger gun laws, teenagers should think about “maybe taking CPR classes,” but that admission didn’t make it one damn bit better.
The fact of the matter is I did misspeak in using the term CPR. I think Sanjay Gupta's job here at CNN is probably safe as being the medical commentator on things. But the reality is, it obscured the larger point. The larger point which is that what we’ve seen from all these mass shootings, is that the things that have come out, the positive things that have come out of these mass shootings, are organizations and people who have actually focused on what we can do in our individual schools and communities to actually prevent these types of things. Things like Rachel’s Challenge or even Sandy Hook Promise. And other organizations that have said ‘what can we do in our community to, you know, promote mentoring, to stop bullying, to be more aware of the problems,’ and what I’ve seen happen here is avoiding the issues that are really, actually unifying, and that’s really the most disturbing thing.
Take a moment to try to reconstitute your no-doubt-exploded brains after reading that. Where to even start? Back with the idea that CPR could do anything about assault weapon injuries that a doctor compared to “an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer”? Oh, but he misspoke on that! The point is that we should be looking at individual schools rather than at … the thing all mass shootings have in common, apparently. We should promote mentoring and stop bullying, Santorum says, just after Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior Isabelle Robinson wrote about her efforts to be nice to Nikolas Cruz even after he assaulted her and while he ogled and verbally abused her. Saying this is about mentoring and bullying is nothing but victim-blaming and avoiding the real issue.
Avoiding the issue being what Santorum wants to accuse the Parkland teens and hundreds of thousands more of doing—but the issues that are unifying? The issue that unifies mass shootings is the availability of guns that facilitate mass shootings. Oh, but Santorum means unifying us, the people who are still alive, in a response. Yeah, well, support for universal background checks is about as unifying as any issue gets these days. Support for bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons is extremely high. If Santorum wants to unify us, he could get with the program and stop blaming victims, stop pretending the issue is something it’s not, stop minimizing the horrific violence an AR-15 does to the human body.
Can someone please make a gif of the uselessness of CPR on someone who’s been shot by an assault weapon and googlebomb Santorum with that?