The day after hundreds of thousands marched in cities across the world to protest gun violence, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (R) suggested that students should focus on CPR training instead of trying to change gun laws.

“Is this really all about politics, or is this about keeping our schools safe? Because if it is about keeping our schools safe, then we need to have a much broader discussion than the discussion that is going on right now,” Santorum said during a panel on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

“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 situation where there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.”

It is unclear how CPR would be an effective tool in stopping gun violence, since the method is used to restart a heart that has stopped beating rather than treat the traumatic wounds caused by bullets. CPR would not be able to help repair organ damage from a gunshot wound, or stop bleeding caused by bullets.


An AR-15 — the assault rifle used in mass shootings from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook — causes such trauma to the human body that one surgeon who treated victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School wrote in the Atlantic that one organ hit by a bullet from an AR-15 “looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer.” Another trauma surgeon treating a victim found “only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15.”

Santorum also said that the students who organized the march — survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead — “took action to ask someone to pass a law” but did not take action “as an individual” to deal with the problem of gun violence. Santorum criticized the students for asking for elected officials to pass stricter gun control laws — which he referred to as “phony gun laws” — rather than focusing on individual actions like stopping bullying in schools.

“Those are the kinds of things you can take it in internally and say here’s how I’m going to deal with this and help the situation instead of going and protesting and saying someone else needs to pass a law to protect me,” Santorum said.

During his time in Congress, Santorum received $115,942 in political donations from gun rights groups.

The March for Our Lives protests — which took place in 800 cities around the world — drew hundreds of thousands of participants. In Washington, D.C., an estimated 200,000 people flooded the streets to hear more than a dozen youth speakers talk about their experience with gun violence and call for political accountability from legislators who oppose stricter gun control measures.

“This needs to be centralized issue in the next election,” Delaney Tarr, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student who helped organize the march, said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.


A Fox News poll released on Sunday found that voters consider protecting against violence more important than protecting gun rights by a margin of 13 points.