“They’ve been elevated as leftist heroes — but some of these students’ actions and words were less than classy,” Laura Ingraham said Friday night on Fox News.
The host of “The Ingraham Angle” was referring to a recently leaked interview “The Outline” did with Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting survivor-turned-anti-gun activist David Hogg. In it, Hogg (shown above, along with fellow activist Emma Gonzalez) used plenty of foul language.
“It just makes me think what sick f***ers out there want to continue to sell more guns, murder more children, and honestly just get re-elected,” Hogg said. “What type of s***ty person does that? They could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see these dollar signs.”
The video was uploaded to YouTube and later taken down by the site. YouTube tried to argue the video violated its “bullying and harassment standards,” said Ingraham.
In response to the Hogg revelations, Ingraham discussed with two other political pundits the role these Parkland students actually have in terms of their lobbying efforts against the Second Amendment. The national director of Journey4Justice, community organizer Jitu Brown, seemed to agree with what the leftists students are doing.
“Often, when people are confronted with conditions that aren’t being addressed — I don’t blame them for their anger or frustration,” Brown said. “I’ve been there, where issues weren’t being addressed, [when] common-sense things were being denied. And you wonder, ‘Who I’m dealing with? Who am I talking to?'”
The editor-in-chief of CampusReform.org, Lawrence Jones, disagreed with that logic. Jones did not believe that merely being present when a tragedy occurred — as so many Parkland high school students unfortunately were — suddenly turns them into policy experts.
“They’re being given talking points by groups that are anti-gun,” said Jones. “We’ve talked about this from an emotional aspect, but at the end of the day, these legislators don’t know what they’re doing. These congressmen don’t know what they’re doing … You can’t make policy based on emotion. We need facts. It’s a constitutional right to have guns and at the end of the day, they want to get rid of our guns.”
Related: March for Our Lives Event: ‘Expose of Highest Hypocrisy’
As the discussion progressed, Brown of Journey4Justice grew frustrated and made unsubstantiated claims that Americans don’t care about gun violence in places like Parkland and Chicago, and that America has the highest murder rate in the world.
Not only did Ingraham and Jones try to quickly correct him that the U.S. is not the murder capital of the world — according to USA Today, El Salvador holds that title — but they also assured him that it’s absurd and insulting to say gun owners don’t care about children.
Related: Students’ Anti-Gun Protests Show Much Passion, Little Logic
“What we’re saying is that we don’t allow children to dictate policy of any type in this country,” Ingraham said.
“They shouldn’t be dictating policy which they can’t even participate in,” Jones added. “They can’t even purchase a gun right now!”
Tom Joyce is a freelance writer from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He covers sports, pop culture, and politics and has contributed to The Federalist, Newsday, ESPN, and other outlets.
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