In The Ten Ring said:
"You can't look a dead kid's father in the face and..." That's crap. Strong character, concerned with facts and core beliefs, not staying in office, can look Death itself in the face and not flinch. Rubio isn't that man. Most politicians aren't. I guess he thinks liberals will donate to him now.
Yes, IMO, Rubio came across as weak and pathetic. I applaud him for having the guts to go there, but he was too weak and wobbly in the face of all that hate. The right to keep and bear arms is a RIGHT, and as such, no one should have to feel ashamed to defend the right. The problem is too many don't know how to defend it. In terms of telling a grieving father you will not support gun bans, that is very doable. You do so in a kind way, not an acerbic way, but you explain that you can no more infringe on the right to arms after a school shooting then you could infringe on the rights of Muslims after 9/11, or rights of privacy, religion, due process, etc...after something like 9/11. You explain that the AR-15 has been legally available to civilians since the mid-1960s ('64 or '65) and weapons functionally identical to it have been available long before then. The Tommy gun since the 1930s and the 1911 semiautomatic detachable magazine pistol since 1911. But yet, mass shootings were not a problem back in those days. Which shows that the cause of these mass shootings is not the firearms, it's something else. One of the worst mass shootings ever was the Virginia Tech massacre, with 32 killed and 17 injured. That shooting was committed with handguns. So the technology to do so has been around for over 100 years now.
Some say, "That we even have to have this conversation/debate is pathetic!" but you could easily flip that and say, "That gun rights are even called into question after a mass shooting is absurd. We didn't call into question rights to due process, privacy, and religion after 9/11 with 3,000 people killed." The right to keep and bear arms should be as sacrosanct as the other rights.
Having your loved ones killed does not give you a moral high ground to stand on and demand the constraining of other people's rights. I also am sick of this "weapons of war" nonsense. For one, that is precisely what the right is about. Weapons of war. Tools of combat. It is not a "right" to weapons that the government approves of for you. No more than the right to free speech is a right just to entertainment or recreational speech and not political speech.
In addition, pretty much every commonly-owned gun in the United States is a weapon of war in the sense of being used by the military or grounded in a military design.
