Santorum on Student Protests: Do Something Useful - Take a CPR Class

Monica Sanchez | March 26, 2018
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Over one million Americans across the nation poured into the city streets on Saturday to participate in the anti-gun “March for Our Lives.”

Former Republican senator Rick Santorum in an interview with CNN Sunday night suggested that student activists do something instead of protesting and "looking to someone else to solve their problem” like taking a CPR class or preparing for an active shooter situation.

“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?” said Santorum on CNN’s "State of the Union." 

He went on to say that students aren’t taking action themselves to deal with certain related issues such as bullying.

“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?’” Santorum said. “Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s 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.’”

CNN’s Van Jones praised the students for changing the usual slogan after a school shooting from "thoughts and prayers" to "enough is enough" and "vote them out."

Jones responded to Santorum's point, saying that he is personally proud of the kids for marching and demanding action in Washington.

“If [my teenage son's] 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, because you can do both," he said.

Santorum replied that he is “proud” of the students, too, but that no “phony gun law” is going to solve the issues of bullying, mental health, and emergency preparedness.

“Phony gun laws don’t solve these problems,” he said. "That's what we've found out." 

Santorum said in the beginning of the interview that it is not “insubstantial” that legislators have passed a bill on school security and that Trump announced recently that the Department of Justice will be issuing a rule to effectively ban the sale and possession of bump stocks, which he said would not have happened “but for this movement.”

“But the question is, how far are you going to go in abridging law peoples’ right to own a gun? And that’s really where the debate comes down,” said Santorum.

Check out the full interview below.

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