Doctors and health-care professionals are criticizing former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) after he suggested Sunday that student activists should learn CPR instead of protesting for gun control.
The day after thousands of students across the country took to the streets to protest gun violence during the March for Our Lives, Santorum made remarks about CPR while appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“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 situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said.
Dr. Heather Sher, a Florida radiologist, called the statement “gobsmackingly uninformed” on Twitter, suggesting that the former GOP congressman leave “public health and medicine to docs.”
Sher wrote in The Atlantic about her experience examining the wounds of victims from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Feb. 14 in Parkland, Fla.
Eugene Gu, a surgeon who has operated on gunshot victims, called Santorum’s statement “simply unconscionable.”
Gu, who is also an opinion columnist for The Hill, compared Santorum to the former queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
Other critics on Twitter piled on to the criticism of Santorum.