Rubio Was Just Asked by Student Cameron Kasky to Pledge He Would Never Accept Nra Money Again
K arco Rubio is a very talented pol. He walked into an arena full of 7,000 Floridians who were determined to heckle him for siding with the National Rifle Clan (NRA) for his entire career.
But within minutes of talking, he earned some respect. He didn't stop the heckling, but he did his very best impression of a sincere man who honestly wanted to keep children safe, if only there weren't then many complications to this whole lawmaking thing.
At that place are plain lots of guns, and lots of loopholes. How on earth can a piddling police force tackle such a large trouble?
He offered up some token concessions that would practise not very much at all to stop the massacres: raising the age you could purchase an assault weapon, but not banning them. Meliorate groundwork checks, but not universal ones. Stopping the sale of bump stocks, which played no part in the bloodshed at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas loftier school.
With aplenty charm and empathy, he near got away with it. Until he met a 17-year-old student who was just as talented as him: Cameron Kasky, who survived the shooting by huddling with his brother in a classroom.
Kasky walked up to Rubio and shook his paw, along with the hands of the other politicians on stage: Florida senator Nib Nelson and his local congressman, Ted Deutch, both Democrats. He asked his friend to stand up up and be best-selling for signing up to serve in the war machine. And he asked the crowd not to boo Republicans and cheer Democrats. Similar Rubio, he believed the nation needed to come together. "Anyone who is willing to change is someone we need on our side," he declared.
And then the student closed in. "So, Senator Rubio," he said casually, "tin can you tell me you won't be accepting a unmarried penny from the NRA?"
The crowd cheered like it was a slam dunkfest.
"People purchase into my agenda," insisted Rubio, ignoring the public disgust with buying and selling politics.
"So you won't take more NRA money?" Kasky pressed on.
"That'south the wrong way to expect at it," Rubio said. "People buy into my agenda."
"In the name of the 17 people who died, y'all can't enquire the NRA to keep their coin?" Kasky asked in disbelief. "I bet we can get people to give yous exactly every bit much money."
Rubio told Kasky he was right: at that place was coin on both sides of politics. But that wasn't the question, and his answer was every bit irrelevant every bit his favorite playlist.
Information technology was a solar day for excessive sympathy and inadequate concessions. At that place were and so many fine words of encouragement for all those feisty teenagers, and then many regrets for the grieving families. It was a long-winded style of sending thoughts and prayers; the modern-24-hour interval version of paying for tears at a Victorian funeral.
Y'all know the ground is shifting when the NRA and its A-plus-rated politicians feel the need to evidence upwards to a CNN town hall where they know they volition be the targets of abuse for a grieving community.
But they also think they can ride this thing out with lots of talk about stopping insane people, rather than stopping the semi-automatics.
It'due south just and so darn hard to do what every other state has done to end these mass shootings.
It took a sheriff in uniform to call out the NRA'southward deception. When Dana Loesch, the NRA'southward media-hating spokesperson had empathized her middle out, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel set her directly.
"You lot just told this grouping of people yous're standing up for them," he said. "You are not standing up for them until you say y'all want less weapons."
Unlike the NRA, Rubio could at to the lowest degree consider an culling, every bit he adopted his familiar posture of Solomon-sized thoughtfulness. He said he would "reconsider" his position on high-chapters magazines that conduct plenty bullets to kill a whole classroom in seconds.
If only information technology were easier to take his seriousness seriously.
He was serious about immigration reform, earlier he completely caved. He wrestled day and night with how to reconcile his nativist party with the ceremonious rights of the undocumented. Naturally, he sided with the xenophobes.
He was serious nigh alert the country about the obvious dangers of electing Donald Trump. He told us Trump was "a first-charge per unit con creative person" and "clown deed" who would bankrupt the nation.
But and then he decided Trump was a true leader on Cuba, and all was forgiven.
At to the lowest degree the senator and the sheriff agreed that Trump's latest thought for schoolhouse rubber – arming the teachers – was as dumb as it sounded.
They both slapped downwards the latest fantasy of gun-makers and gun-dealers, merely a few hours after Trump spun a story about Aaron Feis, the heroic high school coach who was killed final week.
"If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy – that coach was very brave, saved a lot of lives, I suspect," Trump rambled. "But if he had a firearm, he wouldn't take had to run, he would have shot him, and that would take been the end of it."
As one of the high school teachers told Rubio, no one wants to be holding a gun when the Swat teams enter a school.
This has been a tough week for the American people, and most of all for one of them who happens to be president.
It's bad plenty that Donald Trump has to expect serious around the victims of a school massacre, which he finds incommunicable, for some incomprehensible reason. Nix says you're serious about saving the lives of children like grinning with a big thumbs up.
Our entire Nation, w/one heavy eye, continues to pray for the victims & their families in Parkland, FL. To teachers, law enforcement, start responders & medical professionals who responded so bravely in the face of danger: We Give thanks Y'all for your courage! https://t.co/3yJsrebZMG picture.twitter.com/ti791dENTy
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Feb 17, 2018
Information technology's doubly bad that Trump has to pretend that he's going to do something to cease school shootings, when he is in fact super-duper proud of serving equally the NRA's stooge. "You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you lot," he promised the NRA convention final twelvemonth. At least nosotros're clear whose side he'due south on.
Only, then to cap it all, some vivid immature staffer thought information technology was a not bad idea to stage a listening session with the victims of several shootings. You'd think, after a twelvemonth of working together in what you lot might telephone call a hostile workplace, those brilliant staffers would know the dominate past now.
Trump would perform far amend if these were presidential exercises in speaking, rather than listening. Perhaps that explains the grotesque demand to write on Trump's crib canvass: "I hear you."
It might accept been more than meaningful if they had scripted the line: "I'grand listening." Simply that was Frasier Crane's catchphrase, and so information technology's not that much ameliorate.
Sadly fifty-fifty a sitcom psychiatrist would exercise a better chore at grieving for America's lost children.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/marco-rubio-cameron-kasky-cnn-town-hall-florida-gun-control
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