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Feb. 22, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:04

CNN's Hour Of Anti-Gun Hate | Ep. 481

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	President Trump meets shooting victims and CNN runs one of the worst town halls on gun control I have ever seen in my life.
	It's truly egregious.
	Orwellian two minutes of hate stuff.
	I'll go through all of it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	We have a lot to get to today.
	We're gonna spend a lot of time with the CNN town hall that took place last night, moderated by Jake Tapper.
	I think Jake is a pretty good journalist, but I think that this did not do him any credit.
	I thought that the CNN special last night, which featured all of these shooting survivors asking questions of Marco Rubio, really casting accusations of Marco Rubio and Etienne Lash of the National Rifle Association, and then a crowd filled with people from Broward County where the shooting took place, cheering wildly, screaming, booing. and then a crowd filled with people from Broward County It really was an egregious scene.
	I'm going to go through all of that.
	I'm going to explain why it was so bad.
	Also, President Trump at the White House asking questions of and being asked questions by shooting survivors.
	One of those events was good.
	One of those events, not so much.
	I'll explain all of this.
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	Alright, so, we begin today, now at the CNN Town Hall, we'll get to that in just a few minutes, but with an actual useful thing.
	Okay, this useful thing happened at the White House yesterday.
	So, at the White House yesterday, the President of the United States had a bunch of people in who'd been shooting victims, family of shooting victims, some people from Parkland, Florida, some people from Sandy Hook, some people from other mass shootings that have taken place around the country.
	And he had a listening session with them.
	Now, Trump was mocked by the media because he was holding a piece of paper during this with notes on it, and one of the notes said, I hear you.
	And so the idea was, oh, well, I guess he's being coached to hear people.
	But, you know, President Trump actually is quite good in these sorts of situations.
	And I think to everyone's surprise, they expected him to get angry or, in knee-jerk fashion, argue with folks.
	He didn't do that.
	He sat there and he took it.
	He took it on the chin from a lot of people who were very upset.
	It was a wide variety of perspectives.
	So the media were very upset with this because they want all town halls to basically be people who are shooting victims or shooting victims' family or friends.
	They want those people to all be pro-gun control fanatics who go up there and yell at politicians.
	That's what it was on CNN last night.
	So they were very upset that the White House had a variety of perspectives.
	So they had some people who are pro-gun control, some people who thought that school safety and armed guards were the solution.
	But that wide variety of perspectives was actually useful.
	And again, it demonstrated something that the left does not want you to believe.
	I've been saying this now since the Parkland shooting.
	I've been saying it more than that for five years.
	Since the Piers Morgan interview I did on CNN after the Sandy Hook shooting, the left media, so many people in the left media, wish you to believe that people who own guns, people who care about Second Amendment rights, people who want to protect their families, that these are people who don't care if children are shot.
	That they just don't care enough.
	If they truly cared enough, then they'd agree with the gun control agenda.
	Well, Trump yesterday showed that he cared, and that's what made the media so angry about this event.
	I think it was a useful event.
	I think that it was an event that had class.
	I think it was an event that had dignity.
	And I think that it was an event that, again, demonstrated that we are all in this together.
	This is the thing that's missing.
	The media are trying to drive us apart.
	There are a bunch of folks on the anti-gun left who are trying to suggest, because this is the only way they can find to push their unpopular agenda, they're trying to suggest that anyone who disagrees with them is morally bereft.
	Those people have moral shortcomings.
	The truth is, we're all neighbors.
	We all mourn when we see things like what happened in Parkland.
	We all want to stop that stuff.
	I want the shooter to fry in hell.
	You do too.
	Everyone's on the same page with this.
	Except for the people who wish to believe that their political opponents are actually scum of the earth, pieces of crap, Okay, so at the White House yesterday, there were a bunch of folks who spoke.
	One of them was a Parkland father named Andrew Pollack.
	He was a Trump supporter.
	There was a famous picture of him going around during the actual massacre.
	This is the view that too many on the left have of law abiding American gunners.
	Okay, so at the White House yesterday, there are a bunch of folks who spoke.
	One of them was a Parkland father named Andrew Pollack.
	He was a Trump supporter.
	There was a famous picture of him going around during the actual massacre.
	He's driving around trying to find his daughter who'd been murdered in the shooting.
	He's wearing a Trump 2020 t-shirt.
	He was at the White House, and here's what he had to say to President Trump about losing his daughter.
	It's not about gun laws right now.
	That's another fight, another battle.
	Let's fix the schools, and then you guys can battle it out whatever you want.
	But we need our children safe, Monday, tomorrow, whatever day it is.
	Your kids are going to go to school.
	You think everyone's kids are safe?
	I didn't think it was going to happen to me.
	If I knew that, I would have been at the school every day if I knew it was that dangerous.
	It's enough.
	Let's get together, work with the President, and fix the schools.
	Okay, well, working with the President is something Democrats don't want to do, and they don't want to give him credit for moving on the issue at all, even though he tweeted out this morning that he wants better background checks, and that he wants to ban bump stocks, and that he wants to raise the age of rifle purchase until 21.
	That last measure is one that I can understand if you're also going to raise the age of consent to 21 in terms of joining the military or voting, but it seems to me that we can't grant rights piecemeal to people.
	We can't say you have the right to vote, but not the right to drink or the right to bear arms.
	It doesn't work like that in the United States.
	Rights are generally granted when you reach the point of maturity.
	Or at the point of adulthood.
	In any case, this guy was not given, this father was not given the sort of credibility and respect that the media normally grants to shooting victims and fathers.
	They haven't had this fellow on CNN every single day.
	They have had the students on every single day because obviously there's an agenda here and the agenda is put on young people specifically so you can't argue with them.
	This is the goal.
	Here's the game, how it's played.
	So, a student is at a facility where somebody is shot.
	And the student sees something terrible.
	And we all grieve with the student.
	And so we all say, we grieve with you.
	And the student says, well, if you really grieved with me, you'd do what I wanted.
	And we say, well, you know, we can disagree on policy and still grieve with you.
	And then the media say, how dare you criticize this young person who's only showing the courage of their convictions?
	As I have said one million times at this point, you can always show the courage of your convictions.
	It doesn't demonstrate necessarily the wiseness of your convictions.
	Now, I was getting a little flack yesterday because I wrote a column for National Review talking about how being young does not confer evidentiary expertise on you.
	That being a person who's suffered doesn't Right, I was.
	And I was being criticized like an adult when I was 17.
	Which is the way that it should work.
	17 year olds should speak.
	They should be involved in politics.
	A lot of my fans are 17.
	I want them to be involved in politics.
	That's great.
	But understand, when you enter the political arena, your arguments are going to be cause for controversy.
	And that doesn't go away just because you're young or just because you went through something truly, truly awful.
	Okay, that wasn't the only Parkland survivor or family member to be at the White House.
	There was a wide variety of perspectives.
	As I say, there were people there who were very critical of Trump on guns.
	One of them was a Parkland survivor who told Trump that he didn't think that people should be able to buy weapons of war.
	I was reading today that a person 20 years old walked into a store and bought an AR-15 in five minutes with an expired ID.
	How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon?
	Okay, that's Samuel.
	Zaph, one of the problems here is that what he's saying is not true.
	I talked about this yesterday.
	Chris Cuomo put out a tweet about a story that was false, in which a guy claimed that he was able to purchase an AR-15 without showing ID, and that he was able to do so in five minutes without a federal background check.
	That story was not true, as we pointed out.
	Even in the story, the guy was turned away from the gun store when he couldn't show ID and didn't want to go through a federal background check.
	It shows you the impact of the media and how their coverage skews people's perspectives on how easy it is to get guns.
	It's an enormous number of stories about how we need to ban machine guns.
	Machine guns have been effectively banned in the United States since the 1980s.
	Machine guns have been in very small circulation in the United States for decades at this point.
	There are people who say that we should have mental health background checks.
	We do have mental health background checks in the United States.
	We need to make the system more transparent.
	We need to make the reporting better.
	38 states in the United States report less than 80% of the people who shouldn't have guns to their full federal background checklist.
	But that's a problem with the law enforcement structure, not a problem with the capacity of the law itself.
	The law itself is a lot stricter than people think it is with regard to purchasing weapons on the federal level.
	So Trump answers all of these survivors and friends and family, and he talks about a couple of things that he would like to do.
	One of his proposals is that we should arm 20% of teachers who are actually qualified to carry weapons in the classroom.
	So let's say you had 20% of your teaching force, because that's pretty much the number.
	If these cowards knew that the school was, you know, well-guarded from the standpoint of having pretty much professionals with great training, I think they wouldn't go into the school to start off with.
	I think it could very well solve your problem.
	Okay, so a lot of people were very upset about this.
	How dare he say that he was going to arm 20% of teachers?
	Now, what the media did is they lied.
	They said that he wanted to arm all teachers.
	He did not say he wanted to arm all teachers.
	He said, if you're qualified, he was specifically, it turns out, singling out ex-vets, military members, police.
	I'm not sure it's the best solution.
	I think armed security guards are a better solution in uniform on campus, you know, deterring people from committing crimes.
	But the media lied about what he said and then blew it up to epic proportions.
	In just a second, we'll talk about the impact of what Trump did, and then we'll get to what was just an egregious media display of bias, There was a lot of immorality going on last night on CNN.
	Again, this is not to say that victims should not be able to speak out.
	They should speak out.
	It's not to say that victims should not be on TV.
	That's fine with me, if they're on TV.
	What it is to say is that CNN, other outlets like CNN, only have big town halls in liberal areas with shooting victims.
	They would never have, for example, a full town hall with, case in point, they would never have a full town hall with people who are victims of illegal immigrant crime in Phoenix, Arizona.
	Sean Hannity might, but you'd never see that on CNN on their quote-unquote objective news shows.
	But Sean is not an objective reporter.
	He says that openly.
	But CNN claims to be objective, and therein lies the problem.
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	Okay, so...
	Last night, I get home from my long day in Washington, D.C., and I flip on CNN, because everybody on Twitter is talking about this town hall.
	Now, I knew that this town hall was going to go wildly wrong from the start, because CNN has an agenda here.
	And I know they were claiming that it's just students who are asking questions, but people at CNN are journalists.
	They know what a loaded question sounds like.
	A loaded question is, when did you stop beating your wife, Senator?
	That's a loaded question.
	That was the entirety of the town hall last night.
	So the people who were there, it was Senators from Florida.
	So it was Senator Marco Rubio and the Democratic Senator from Florida, whose name is Bill Nelson.
	So he's been the Senator there since 2001.
	They were both there.
	Dana Lash from the NRA showed up as well.
	And this turned into basically a hootenanny.
	It was a bunch of people in the crowd, hundreds of people in the crowd from the Broward County area.
	And then number one, important to note, Broward County, Democratic area, very left area, voted for Hillary Clinton in a state that went red for Donald Trump.
	They voted, I think it was 54 to 46 for Hillary Clinton in that area.
	And this area of Broward County is apparently pretty left.
	The sheriff there, a guy named Steve Israel, has been photographed with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
	So it's a Democrat area.
	So the shooting took place in a Democrat area and the people there were family and friends of victims.
	So what you are likely to get when you set this up is obviously emotions running incredibly high and also an agenda that is obviously very clear.
	And this thing turned into a debacle right from the start with people asking questions that were utterly inappropriate on a moral level.
	Okay, just because you've suffered something doesn't mean you get to say immoral things.
	There were kids there who were saying some of the most immoral things that- truly immoral things.
	So, for example, let's do clip 28.
	So this is Cameron Kasky.
	He's one of the students who's been most featured on CNN because obviously they're not going to feature a bunch of students who are right-wing.
	That wouldn't be a thing.
	Instead, they're going to feature students who are left-wing.
	So Cameron Kasky asks asks Rubio a question, and in the process of the question, he says something that is so deeply immoral, it's shocking and it should be gut-churning to you. - Senator Rubio, it's hard to look at you and not look down the barrel of an AR-15 and not look at Nicholas Cruz, but the point is you're here, and there are some people who are but the point is you're here, and there are some people who are not. - Okay, that right there, it's hard not to look at you and be looking down the barrel of I understand you just went through something.
	I understand what you went through was difficult and terrible and horrible and no person should have to go through that.
	I get all of that.
	That statement is deeply immoral.
	That is a disgusting statement.
	Marco Rubio didn't shoot anybody.
	Marco Rubio did not walk into a school and mow down children.
	And Marco Rubio's agenda is not to facilitate the mowing down of children.
	But again, the left's suggestion here is that everyone who is not on their side must be acting in bad faith.
	The only people acting in bad faith are the people who say stuff like that.
	Those are the only people who are acting in bad faith.
	I mean, the entire night was just an evening of grandstanding by political officials and an evening of throwing around the most immoral, morally charged language by some of the students.
	And listen, your obligation to be a moral human being and say moral things does not stop when you experience tragedy.
	To suggest that Marco Rubio is akin to a school shooter is disgusting.
	It's disgusting.
	Okay, and I...
	I'm not saying that the kid is disgusting.
	I'm saying that statement is disgusting.
	Because the statement is disgusting.
	And again, bad statements.
	Immoral statements.
	They don't become less immoral just because you experienced some pain.
	And I know that people on the left agree with me.
	Because if there was a bombing victim, or a family of a bombing victim, or a witness to a bombing...
	Who said, let's throw every Muslim in the United States out of the country.
	The left would say that's an immoral statement.
	And they'd be right.
	That is an immoral statement.
	It is an immoral statement to also say that a sitting senator in the United States wants children to die.
	Wants children to die simply so they can get whatever it is, $9,000 that Rubio got from the National Rifle Association?
	Okay, that CNN special last night was designed to do one thing, and that was to drive a moral wedge between fellow Americans.
	Truly, truly despicable.
	Okay, that was not the limit of it, of course.
	The Broward County Sheriff, Steve Israel, was there as well, and he was there in his full-scale Democratic capacity.
	So, let's do a quick flashback.
	This sheriff, whose department missed 39 separate warnings on this kid.
	Okay, the shooter, the department was visiting this shooter's home six to seven times a year.
	For years.
	And they still didn't have enough authority, supposedly, to put this kid away?
	To take guns away from this person?
	I mean, the sheriff's office missed it.
	They blew it.
	But what is the sheriff blaming it on?
	Well, of course, he's going to blame it on guns.
	So here's a flashback.
	Here's Steve Israel.
	This is just last week.
	Standing with Rick Scott, the governor of the state of Florida, and pushing gun control in front of Rick Scott.
	If you're an elected official and you want to keep things the way they are and not do things differently...
	If you want to keep the gun laws as they are now, you will not get reelected in Broward County.
	Right, so that guy right there is obviously a political actor with a political agenda, but he was portrayed on CNN as just a sheriff, right?
	Just a law enforcement official.
	Okay, the guy's a Democrat, obviously, and he has an agenda, pretty obviously.
	Nowhere was that clearer than when Dana Lash over at the NRA, who was there, asked the sheriff, OK, so why didn't you stop it?
	You're the law enforcement body.
	You were warned.
	What did you do about it?
	And the media's response to Dana was, how dare Dana Lash ask Steve Israel something like that?
	It's one thing to blame Marco Rubio for the shooting.
	It's another to blame the actual sheriff who's responsible for maintaining the safety and security of the students of Broward County.
	It's another to say that he blew it.
	It's one thing to blame gun owners like me all the way across the country in Los Angeles.
	But to blame, you know, to cast any weary eye upon the sheriff who's responsible for security?
	How dare Dana Lash?
	This is clip 31.
	Just, again, look at the crowd's response to Dana asking a very solid question here.
	We need the power to take every firearm they have away from them and bring them to a mental health facility.
	Did not meet that standard?
	39 visits, assaulting students, assaulting parents, taking bullets and knives to school.
	Did that not meet that standard?
	Well, which are you speaking about specifically?
	You seem to know about all 39.
	Well, I know there's one Florida statute where if he's sending messages threatening to kill people, that right there, under Florida state law.
	Who did he send the message to kill people to?
	BuzzFeed, AP, Reuters, Yahoo News, all reported that it was to other students.
	Who was the victim?
	It was sent to other students.
	Dana, Reuters can't be a victim.
	The only person who could be a victim is an individual.
	They were reporting this, Sheriff, is what I'm saying.
	So if an individual was threatened, and it was real, that's a crime.
	Yes, they were threatened with death.
	They were threatened that they were going to bleed.
	They were threatened that they were going to be killed.
	Well, what's your specific case?
	And he had already taken bullets and knives to school.
	He had already assaulted people.
	He assaulted his parent.
	He assaulted other students.
	39 visits.
	And this was known to the intelligence and law enforcement community.
	You're saying 39 visits?
	Now, look, I'm not saying that you can be everywhere at once, but this is what I'm talking about.
	We have to follow up on these red flags.
	You're not the litmus test.
	Okay, and of course the crowd starts turning on Dana for mentioning the fact that when you visit a home 39 times and the guy shoots up a school, maybe you missed something.
	How many red flags do you have to have?
	Okay, that seems like a better question to me than, Marco Rubio, you're obviously Satan, what are you doing here?
	Why are you Satan?
	Why are you Satan?
	And all of this, of course, was forwarded and nodded on by CNN.
	I mean, listen to Emma Gonzalez.
	Emma Gonzalez is another one of the students who's been featured on CNN a lot.
	You can always tell which are the students who are pro-gun control because those are the ones whose faces you actually recognize.
	So when you look at Emma Gonzalez, you'll recognize her face because you saw it on CNN a lot.
	When you see some of the other students who were not at the CNN town hall for reasons that we will discuss in a second, then what you will see is that you don't recognize their faces because they're not on CNN a lot.
	So here's Emma Gonzalez, who actually says straight out to Dana Lash that she's going to support Dana Lash's kids better than Dana Lash is.
	Dana Losh, I want you to know that we will support your two children in a way that we will not.
	You will not.
	The shooter at our school obtained weapons that he used on us legally.
	Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain these semi-automatic weapons and the modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic like bump stocks?
	Well, first off, Emma, I want to applaud you for standing up and speaking out.
	And for anyone who has ever criticized you, or any of these students up here, including people who have been on my side of this issue.
	Okay, so, good for Dana for not taking the bait there.
	But, again, what a horrifying statement.
	I'm gonna defend your children away you won't.
	I'd like to see Emma Gonzalez name Dana Lash's kids.
	She doesn't know Dana's kids.
	Again, the implication is that Dana must not care about children because Dana doesn't agree with Emma Gonzalez on this issue.
	It got worse than that.
	An audience member actually called Dana Lash a murderer in the middle of this special.
	Nobody says a word.
	It's just incredible.
	This is clip 24.
	Do you know that it is not federally required for states to actually report people who are prohibited possessors, crazy people, people who are murderers?
	No?
	We've been actually talking about that for a long time.
	Let me answer the question.
	Let me answer the question.
	You can shout me down when I'm finished, but let me answer Emma's question.
	Okay, and you can actually hear in the background audience members shouting at Dana that she's a murderer.
	If you believe that Marco Rubio's the murderer, if you believe that Dana Lash is the murderer, but if you don't believe that the shooter is responsible for his own actions, and if you believe that 300 million people in the United States have to have their gun rights removed from them instead of us focusing on how to fix this issue, if you think we're all that unsympathetic, Then I would suggest you have a screw loose.
	You actually do have a problem.
	Your morality is skewed beyond belief if you think Dana Lash is a murderer or Marco Rubio is equivalent to the man who shot children in the face at a Parkland High School.
	Just repulsive.
	It got even worse than that.
	That wasn't even the extent of it.
	So we will discuss the rest of that in just one second.
	So let's start with Some of the questions that were asked of Senator Rubio.
	So Senator Rubio, again, he's not the best advocate for the Second Amendment.
	He's a senator from Florida, which is why he was there.
	But Senator Rubio has a bad habit of trying to please the crowd that is in front of him.
	And so during the course of this debate, he kind of moved on a bunch of issues regarding raising the age of buying weapons, as well as the availability of AR-15s and all the rest of this.
	The questions that were being asked were truly amazing.
	So this is clip 12.
	You're going to see the father of one of the murdered students trying to push Rubio to say that guns were the sole reason for the shooting.
	And Rubio won't go there, and the crowd starts booing him, which again demonstrates the silliness of this.
	It is true, by the way, that guns were a factor here because the gun was used.
	Just as in any murder, the murder weapon is a factor.
	But does that mean it is the sole factor?
	Of course not.
	That's ridiculous.
	You and I are now eye to eye.
	Because I want to like you.
	Look at me and tell me guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in this school this week.
	And look at me and tell me you accept it and you will work with us to do something about guns.
	Okay, and then Rubio answers by saying, of course guns were a factor, but they were not the deciding factor, which of course is true.
	That of course is true.
	And there's a fantastic thread on Twitter.
	That an actual scholar has written about what exactly it is that mass shooters have in common.
	And bottom line is it is a large variety of factors.
	It is not one thing, it is many things.
	But we can't handle that in the United States.
	So it always has to come down to one thing.
	And of course, Marco Rubio has to be browbeaten for being a Second Amendment advocate.
	It gets even worse than that.
	Okay, so watch this.
	This is the clip that is going to be played over and over and over by Second Amendment advocates.
	You understand, if you are an advocate for gun control, the worst thing you can do right now, in a time when everyone is on the same side regarding the horrors that just happened, the worst thing you can do is claim that those of us who disagree with you are evil and nasty.
	You're seeing movement.
	You are.
	I mean, just a bit of political advice.
	You are seeing movement from people on the pro-gun side saying we'd be willing to look at certain gun control measures we may not have been willing to look at before.
	I may not agree with that policy decision on their part, but that is what is happening in real time.
	Instead of you embracing that, instead of you saying, you obviously want to come to the table, let's see if there are places where we can agree, instead of us all coming to the table on issues that may not have to do with confiscating weaponry, but instead may have to do with securing schools, On those issues, instead of you doing that, you are overtly alienating people who disagree with you.
	So here is an example of this.
	So this is clip 30.
	So Rubio is talking about how the—well, you know, before we get to clip 30, clip 29.
	Bill Nelson is the Democrat senator, and Bill Nelson mentions at the very beginning how he wants to ban what he calls assault weapons, including the AR-15.
	Assault weapons, again, have no legal definition.
	Any rifle could theoretically be an assault weapon, depending on the magazine size, or the color, or the grip, or the shape, or whether there's a sight on it, or any of the rest of this.
	So Bill Nelson mentions banning the AR-15, and of course there's big applause, because again, this is a stacked town hall.
	"Sense solutions, like getting the assault rifles off the streets." I will point out that when the Democrats brought up an assault weapons ban in 2009, only 38 Democrats voted in favor of it.
	The entire Senate voted it down overwhelmingly.
	So Marco Rubio later, he says, listen, that all sounds well and good, right?
	Getting assault weapons off the streets and all of this.
	You're talking about banning every semi-automatic gun in the United States, effectively speaking.
	And listen to the crowd.
	Start looking at how easy it is to get around it.
	that you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that sold you.
	Fair enough.
	Fair enough.
	Okay, and here's the point, right?
	If you want to ban all semi-automatic rifles, when he says you have to ban all semi-automatic rifles, for people who don't know what a semi-automatic rifle is, a semi-automatic weapon is just a weapon where when you pull the trigger once, one shot comes out and another round is chambered.
	That is all a semi-automatic weapon is.
	It's basically everything except for like a single-action revolver, right?
	Or a double-action revolver, rather.
	It's pretty much any gun in the United States is effectively a semi-automatic weapon.
	Right, old six-shooters are basically semi-automatic weapons.
	Okay, at least they function like semi-automatic weapons in the sense that one trigger pull means one bullet is fired.
	And they're talking now about full gun bans, right?
	Which would also, I assume, have to include full gun confiscation, right?
	They'd also have to be talking about taking away all of the guns, because it's not enough to ban people from buying new guns, there are too many guns already out there.
	You can get a hold of a gun if you just go to a private seller, it's not that hard.
	So you'd have to create a registry, and then you'd have to ban people from selling, and then you'd probably have to confiscate the weapons because you don't want them out there anyway, because how many people already own guns?
	Now there are 300 million guns in the United States.
	300 million guns in the United States and 100 million gun owners.
	What in the world are you talking about?
	I encourage Democrats to go down this path.
	This is a campaign ad for the NRA.
	Okay, that last clip was a campaign ad for the NRA.
	Now the media last night were going wild over this.
	Look how Rubio stepped right into that one.
	He made a proposal and the Democrats cheered it.
	Alright, go for it.
	Do it.
	Do it!
	I want to see you propose the full repeal of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
	You need 38 states to do it.
	You're going to be lucky if you reach 15.
	Are you out of your minds?
	But apparently the answer is yes, because look, the reality is there is no solution that is dependent on getting rid of the Second Amendment.
	It's not going to happen.
	It's not a reality.
	You try going down to Texas and confiscating all those weapons, you see how that goes.
	You want to see a lot of dead people?
	That's the way you see a lot of dead people, is mass confiscations of weaponry in the United States.
	Not going to happen.
	But again, the media are so beside themselves, they feel like their agenda is finally being forwarded.
	What they don't understand is the only thing that changed today from last night because of the CNN special is a bunch of Republicans went out and bought an AR-15.
	Last night, I was browsing rifles online.
	I wasn't browsing rifles because I'm interested in more violence.
	I'm browsing rifles because I think the Democrats are going to move to try and make it illegal for me to own one.
	And if I want to protect my family, then I want the gun of my choice to protect my family.
	Because guess what?
	I'm not going to mow down children, and I want to be able to stop the bad guy who does want to mow down children.
	Democrats are shooting themselves right in the foot with this sort of stuff.
	And worse, they're dividing the country, and that's really what this is about.
	They're really about trying to get people out to the polls, trying to use this as a wedge issue.
	They think they can get people really excited.
	I promise you, all the anti-gun advocates who are so deeply excited about going to the polls, there are a lot more Americans who own guns, know people who own guns, have fired a gun, than people in the United States who have not.
	Now, listen, I know.
	I'm from Los Angeles.
	Nobody in Los Angeles owns a gun.
	Right?
	Gun ownership in Los Angeles is very low.
	People in New York.
	Not a lot of gun ownership in New York.
	But get out of the media centers of L.A.
	and New York, get into the middle of the country, and everybody owns multiple guns.
	You're talking about a culture war that the left has entered into in an area where it was unnecessary and directly polarizing for no reason, and the media are boosting this because the media have an agenda, and that agenda is to castigate everybody who they disagree with as deplorable.
	This is just another version of Hillary Clinton's shtick about how everybody on the other side is a deplorable, who's a bad human being.
	I hate this more than anything in politics, is the demonization of people who have just basic political disagreements with you as morally evil actors.
	And yet that is what they are doing day after day after day.
	It's really gross.
	They did it again to Rubio last night.
	A student hammered Marco Rubio on taking NRA donations.
	Now, let's point something out.
	Again, this is one of these leftist bugaboos.
	They do this with regard to Charles Koch, for example.
	They say, if you take NRA money, this makes you an NRA show.
	Well, in just a second, I'm going to show you how Marco Rubio answers that charge.
	But making the NRA into the enemy is, of course, one of the chief goals of the left.
	So we're going to talk about that in just a second.
	Plus, an egregious column by E.J.
	Dionne over at the Washington Post, which we'll get to, and some things I like and things I hate.
	But first, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	So as I say, the attempt to paint the NRA as the enemy is truly an astonishing one.
	The left has been trying to do this for years, the NRA as the enemy.
	Now, I think the NRA is making a mistake.
	The mistake the NRA is making, Wayne LaPierre, who's the head of the NRA, did a speech today at CPAC, where I'll be speaking a little bit later.
	And in that speech, he talked about, he really went hard against the Democratic Party.
	He really said some polarizing things about the nature of the political divide.
	I don't think that's useful.
	The whole point of gun ownership in the United States, that does cross party lines.
	Right now, approval ratings for the NRA are about 80% for Republican, only 9% for Democrats.
	Just a few years ago, 36% of Democrats approved of the NRA.
	Now, would it help if the NRA were a little bit less overtly partisan?
	Sure.
	Would it also help if the Democrats weren't trying to use the NRA as a club to beat all of their enemies into submission?
	That would probably help too.
	Well, as an example of this, One of these students gets up and starts hammering Rubio on taking NRA donations.
	And Rubio won't commit to not taking NRA donations, because why the hell should he?
	The NRA is a legal body.
	He's taken like $9,000 in the last election cycle, like a relative nothing.
	But they're asking him to disassociate from a fully legal Second Amendment-pushing organization of law-abiding Americans, six million strong.
	And he refuses to do it.
	But this, of course, makes him a villain because it's the NRA responsible for the shootings, not the sheriff who blew it, not the FBI that blew it, not the shooter, not the school.
	The people responsible for all of this are, of course, people who have nothing to do with it, far away who own guns and have an NRA membership card.
	Here is the student hammering Rubio on NRA donations, clip 22.
	Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA industry?
	So number one, the positions I hold on these issues of the Second Amendment, I've held since the day I entered office in the city of West Miami as an elected official.
	Number two, no, the answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda.
	And I do support the Second Amendment.
	And I also support the right of you and everyone here to be able to go to school and be safe.
	And I do support any law that would keep guns out of the hands of a deranged killer.
	And that's why I support the things that I have stood for and fought for during my time there.
	More NRA money?
	More NRA money?
	That is the wrong way to look.
	First of all, the answer is people buy into my agenda.
	You could say no.
	Number second, well... I... The influence of any group... We're going to be here all night.
	The influence of these groups comes not from money.
	The influence comes from the millions of people that agree with the agenda.
	The millions of Americans that support the NRA and who support gun rights groups.
	In the name of 17 people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?
	I think in the name of 17 people, I can pledge to you that I will support any law that will prevent a killer like this from getting a gun.
	Okay, I mean, look at this.
	Look at this disgusting display, okay?
	Again, this is the leading questions that, like, and Tapper's just sitting there.
	I like Jake, but Jake is just sitting there, and he's allowing this kid to browbeat the senator with a bunch of loaded questions that have nothing, and then he's not even moving to try and quiet the crowd so that Rubio can answer the questions.
	If you're gonna let the kid just go off like this, which is fine, you wanna do that, that's fine.
	Rubio put himself there.
	At least tell the crowd to shut up, okay?
	At presidential debates, they tell the crowd to shut up all the time.
	Why is this any different?
	Why is it different?
	I understand there are a lot of people in there who suffered, a lot of people who are upset.
	But if you don't want it to devolve into the Orwellian two minutes of hate, then this is not the way to do it.
	It's not the way to do it.
	I mean, Rubio can't even answer the question because people are too busy yelling at him.
	There's another lady who got up later and tried to lecture Rubio on the Second Amendment.
	She completely botched the history of the Second Amendment, didn't understand what it was about, and was cheered by members of the media.
	Again, this is designed for only one thing, and that is to polarize a debate that requires no polarization.
	The people who are being disrespected in this debate are not the students.
	There are some morons out there who are disrespecting the students and suggesting that the students are paid lackeys.
	But that's disrespectful.
	So when you suggest that Rubio's a paid lackey of the NRA, aren't you suggesting the same thing?
	A little common baseline respect would go a long way here.
	I respect the right of these students to ask the questions.
	I don't know if the questions are well-informed.
	I don't think they are.
	I don't think the questions are all even moral.
	But they have the right to ask the questions.
	I support the right of the students to speak up.
	Doesn't make what they're saying any smarter.
	I think that's everybody's right in the United States.
	But if there's one side of this debate that's not being respected, it isn't people like me.
	I think that the people on the other side care about dead kids.
	I think that the people who are for gun control do cry, do weep real tears over the deaths of children.
	I think that they are not bad people.
	They're my fellow Americans.
	I think that they are good people who want to stop bad things from happening.
	You gotta give me the same credit.
	Gotta give me the same benefit of the doubt.
	Or you're a bad person because you have no evidence whatsoever that I don't care about kids.
	I cared about kids before I had them.
	I have two now.
	I care about kids even more.
	The notion that I'm sitting around happy when kids die because the NRA just sold some more guns or some such garbage.
	That's exactly what it is.
	It is garbage.
	So EJ Dionne has an egregiously bad column over at the Washington Post today.
	In which he suggests that the people who are not receiving respect are the folks who are in favor of gun control.
	He says, supporters of even modest restrictions on firearms are regularly instructed that their ardent advocacy turns off Americans in rural areas and small towns.
	Those in favor of reforming our firearms laws are scolded as horrific elitists who disrespect a valued way of life.
	Well, no, that's not what happens.
	People who claim that I don't care about dead kids, those are the people who I scorn.
	He says, Well, the reason people think it's the first step toward confiscation is when you have large crowds of people openly cheering gun confiscation.
	to the views of those who see even a smidgen of action to limit access to guns as the first step toward confiscation.
	Well, the reason people think it's the first step toward confiscation is when you have large crowds of people openly cheering gun confiscation.
	That would probably be it.
	He says, Our task is not to fight for laws to protect innocents, but to demonstrate that we really, honestly, truly cross our hearts positively love gun owners and wouldn't for an instant think anything ill of them.
	What is odd is that those with extreme pro-gun views, those pushing for new laws to allow people to carry just about anytime, anywhere, are never called upon to model similar empathy toward children killed, the mourning parents left behind, people in urban neighborhoods suffering from violence, or the majority of Americans who don't own guns.
	Are you insane?
	What do you think the last two weeks have been?
	The last two weeks have been this.
	The last two weeks have been everybody on the right being told to sit down and shut up because people who are survivors are speaking now.
	It's been identity politics of suffering.
	We've been told that we have to treat every, not just the people, which we should treat with respect, but that we ought to treat everything that comes out of their mouth with an unparalleled level of respect.
	Now, the great irony in all of this, of course, is that if there are survivors who are not pro-gun control, those people have essentially been marginalized.
	Now, one of the students is claiming that he was invited to the CNN debate, but then was not allowed to ask a question because he was basically being fed questions by the CNN folks.
	Which is a pretty astounding accusation.
	I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions.
	But Colton Hobb, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded classmates in the midst of terror, says he did not get to share his experience.
	CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted.
	Colton wrote questions about school safety, suggested using veterans as armed school security guards, but claimed CNN wanted him to ask a scripted question instead, so he decided not to go.
	I don't think that it's going to get anything accomplished.
	It's not going to ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have.
	So CNN denied that this happened.
	They said, we would never, we would never leak questions at a town hall.
	You did last time when Donna Brazile, who was then working for the CNN and ended up running the DNC, leaked questions from the CNN town hall to Hillary Clinton.
	So, yeah, you've done that before.
	And then they say, we would never script anything.
	We would never script anything.
	Now, I don't know if CNN tried to script this student's question.
	My guess is that the CNN may have said to him, we want you to write down your question on a piece of paper so that we can sort of contain it.
	But...
	Apparently, what they said is he wrote sort of a little speech instead of a question.
	Well, did you watch any of the clips that we just played?
	Did you watch any of those clips?
	The students were giving little speeches.
	Okay, Cameron Kasky was being given minutes at a time to just go after Rubio over and over and over and over.
	Having one student who thought differently, would that have been the world's most terrible thing?
	Would that have been just the worst thing in the world?
	And as Michelle Malkin points out, CNN has done this before, right?
	They've actually planted people in debates before to ask specific questions.
	So at a Democratic debate in Vegas in 2007, Wolf Blitzer introduced several citizen questioners as, quote, ordinary people and undecided voters.
	They later turned out to include a former Arkansas Democratic director of political affairs, the president of the Islamic Society of Nevada, and a far-left anti-war activist who'd been quoted in newspapers lambasting Harry Reid.
	For his failure to pull out of Iraq.
	So, the media have done this sort of thing before.
	Do I know that that's what happened here?
	No, I'm not suggesting that anybody was paid to be there.
	What I am suggesting is it was a self-selected crowd of people.
	If you are a right-wing, Second Amendment supporter, you did not go to that town hall last night because you knew it was run by CNN, because you know CNN is out to sandbag gun supporters, and because you know that your view is going to be atypical and you won't get to ask a question.
	I mean, this thing was about as rigged from the start as it possibly could be, and people there knew it.
	Okay, people there knew it.
	Suffice it to say, I know people at CNN who are involved in making this, and who acknowledge, freely, that this thing was rigged for emotion, and was rigged for left-wing views.
	In Broward County, and it was a bunch of shooting victims who've already been on CNN specifically talking about why they want gun control.
	This sort of, again, it is painful to me.
	I mean, I had trouble sleeping last night after watching this, not because I think that in all good conscience I have to support gun control, but because I think that we cannot last as a country.
	We cannot last as a country if we are going to continue to maintain that people who disagree with us are inherently bad human beings.
	This cannot stand.
	This is the one issue where we all agree.
	The one issue in all of life where we agree is this issue.
	It's the issue.
	Don't let kids die.
	This is the one issue where we're on the same page.
	And yet, there's this hardcore drive to deploy falsehood about even that.
	We can't even agree on that now.
	And you can see the bad faith of the media.
	An MSNBC host, for example, yesterday went after Governor Rick Scott of Florida because Governor Rick Scott wasn't in his office, a bunch of students showed up, and they wanted to talk with him.
	And here's what this MSNBC host had to say.
	The governor is too busy to meet with them today.
	And as you can see, they have file boxes of paperwork that they want the government to see.
	They're going to try and drop it off at Hashtag HearTheBills.
	HearTheBills.
	They're saying, shame on you.
	They're chanting that over and over again.
	OK, there's only one problem here.
	We're going to stop this dolt for a second.
	OK, that is a lie.
	He did not turn them away from his door.
	He was at the funeral of a shooting victim.
	And the media covered this as though Rick Scott was barring his door to a bunch of sympathetic survivors.
	That's not what happened.
	Doesn't matter.
	The media have to portray it as though Republicans are uncaring Nazis who don't... who don't...
	Shed tears over children who are murdered.
	This sort of media bias is truly gross.
	NBC News is doing the same thing.
	Again, if the media want us to actually find solutions, I have a couple of solutions I've been suggesting over the last several days, including we can call on the media, who apparently love their ratings, to stop showing the faces and names of mass shooters.
	They won't do that, because it might have to sacrifice some ratings and ad dollars if they do that.
	So instead, they'll keep putting those people on TV, even though studies say that the more you show these folks on TV, the more you're making it likely that the next mass shooter goes out and does a mass shooting.
	Doesn't matter.
	The onus is on gun owners, who have nothing to do with any of this.
	Just incredible.
	Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
	So...
	Things I like today.
	So a movie that was not nominated for Best Picture, but it should have been.
	It may be.
	I think it's one of the best films of the year.
	Pretty, pretty easily.
	It's probably in my top four.
	I would say top four films that I've seen this year.
	Blade Runner 2049, Dunkirk.
	The Darkest Hour and The Florida Project.
	The Florida Project just came out and it's been out for a little while.
	It's nominated.
	I think Willem Dafoe is probably going to win Best Supporting Actor this year for Florida Project.
	It is a very good movie.
	It's a hard to watch movie.
	It's not one that you're going to want to buy and watch over and over.
	But it is really an important... I rarely say it's an important movie, but this is actually, I think, an important movie.
	The movie is The Florida Project.
	Here's a little bit of the preview.
	Okay, I warned you.
	One drip and you're out.
	Oh, come on!
	Out now.
	It's gonna melt outside.
	It's melting inside too.
	But Bobby... Out.
	Thank you very much.
	You're not welcome!
	Okay, so the entire movie is about this little girl who is living in basically a run-down motel.
	Willem Dafoe is the manager of the motel, and her mom is a drug addict who later turns to prostitution to make ends meet.
	The whole thing is about intergenerational cycles of poverty, why they continue.
	how children are trained not to behave, are trained not to...
	How childhood wonder tries to flourish even in bad situations and how children love their parents even when their parents are disaster areas.
	But the movie is moving and I think says a lot about how poverty does not necessarily...
	Poverty very often does not create values Values very often creates poverty.
	That may not be the message they were trying to push with the movie.
	That's the message that the movie ends up pushing.
	Anyway, okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	So let's jump right in.
	Okay, so the first thing that I hate, obviously, look, I've talked about disrespect toward people who are Second Amendment advocates.
	One of the stupidest, grossest things that I've seen over the last couple of days are these people who are claiming that Parkland students are crisis actors or paid advocates for a particular political position.
	It's just yucky.
	It's just gross.
	And if you're doing this, you're disgusting.
	There's a Parkland student who came out and said, who actually had to come out on national TV and say, I'm not a crisis actor.
	Well, of course you're not, but we need to show this.
	These people saying this is absolutely disturbing, and I'm not an actor in any sense, way, shape, or form.
	I am the son of a former FBI agent, and that is true.
	But as such, it is also true that I went to- that I go to Stoneman Douglas High School, and I was a witness to this.
	I'm not a crisis actor.
	I'm somebody that had to witness this and live through this, and I continue to have to do that.
	But I'm also- that- it's just- It's unbelievable to me that these people are even saying this, and the fact that Donald Trump Jr.
	liked that post is disgusting to me, but it's also false.
	Okay, so I agree with pretty much everything this kid just said.
	I disagree with him on everything having to do with gun control.
	Again, give the kid the credit to say that he has his own viewpoint, even if his viewpoint is wrong, and don't pretend that this stuff is conspiratorial crisis acting.
	It's just sheer nonsense.
	Okay, we are out of time because I have to get ready to go do my speech at CPAC.
	We'll recap that tomorrow.
	You can probably watch the speech online at CPAC, which is streaming, so go check that out.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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