Before hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Washington D.C. and other cities across the United States and the world for Saturday’s “March For Our Lives” event, NRA TV directly addressed the massive rally’s student organizers with a taunt. According to the Washington Post, network personality Colion Noir took a moment to address the recent shooting at a Maryland high school that was cut short by a St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s deputy. Had a similar “good guy with a gun” been present at Marjory Douglas High School, Noir taunted the student organizers, “no one would know your names.”
The NRA TV host began the short segment by saying that he wanted to “acknowledge the heroism and bravery of Blaine Gaskill, the Maryland school resource officer who stopped a mass shooter in his tracks.” However, he quickly pivoted to an attack on the Parkland survivors turned March For Our Lives organizers:
“To all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment at your march on Saturday, I wish a hero like Blaine Gaskill had been at Marjory Douglas High School last month because your classmates would still be alive and no one would know your names, because the media would have completely and utterly ignored your story, the way they ignored his.”
Noir didn’t stop there, as he went on to suggest that the media at large, but especially CNN, wasn’t interested in covering what Gaskill did in Maryland. (Despite the fact that two CNN headlines from this week read “Maryland school officer stops armed student who shot 2 others” and “Lone resource officer’s quick action stopped the Maryland school shooter within seconds.”) Instead, he claims that the more progressive cable network was “running season five of their gun control reality show featuring the freshest cast of characters yet in their modern-day march on Washington.”
This isn’t the first time the Parkland survivors have been scrutinized by those opposed to their platform. The NRA’s Dana Loesch went toe-to-toe with some of them during CNN’s Town Hall event, while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones challenged one survivor to a debate after the pair fought on Twitter. Most egregious, however, was the immediate spike in videos and posts claiming many of the most vocal Parkland students were actually paid “crisis actors.” A Florida congressman’s aide even went so far as to repeat this dubious claim in an official email exchange with a Tampa Bay Times reporter. The aide, Benjamin Kelly, was promptly fired.
(Via Washington Post)