Finally home and watching the recording. I'm about 10 minutes into the CNN town hall and it's a total mess.
Tapper tried to get a hold of things but this event seemed destined to be a mess from the very beginning.
Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla) is making mistakes left and right on current law. He has a weird definition of hunting where, apparently, nothing gets killed.
Just a lot of gun control talking points and hate aimed at Rubio so far. Not really much interesting going on.
This is basically just a big gun control rally. Lots of insanely overheated rhetoric.
Just got to the portion where Rubio flip-flops on limiting gun magazine sizes. It'll be interesting to see how that plays with his voters.
Rubio rattling off new gun control measures he'd support. Fix NICS, bump fire stock ban, raising the age of rifle purchases to 21, the safe schools act.
Getting to the part with Dana Loesch and the Broward County Sherrif now.
This starts off in a really disappointing way with one of the students attacking Dana for not caring about her own children. Gross.
Pretty ridiculous for the Sheriff who actually could have stopped the shooter during his departments 39 interactions with him but didn't to blame anyone else for what happened.
Just lots of angry screaming at Dana Loesch. Tapper, to his credit, is trying to let Dana answer the questions.
Suddenly, when the Sherrif's own very significant failure is brought up, the only one responsible for the shooting is the shooter. Quite the turnaround.
Then he goes off on an uninformed rant on gun control and gets a huge standing ovation? Unreal.
Now they're booing Kimberly Corban's story of wanting a gun after being raped. This is completely off the rails.
Not sure what to say about all this. Certainly, the survivors and the parents have the right to be upset and angry and voice their opinions. I think Tapper tried to keep a handle on things. Seems like it was always going to end in a mess.
The Sherrif is now talking about how his department received multiple tips about the killer but he STILL doesn't know if they made any mistakes in how they handled the tips. Geeze.
This Sherrif has no answers for his complete failure to take any meaningful action against the shooter. He claims the media is lying about contacts they had with the killer. Demands more power for his department while he plays dumb about the threats the killer had made.
The crowd cheers him, of course.
It's disturbing how little scrutiny the Sheriff gets in this town hall, honestly. He could have actually stopped the killer but he didn't.
Dana Loesch points out that a number of recent shootings should have been prevented under current laws but weren't because of law enforcement failures and gets booed for it. I don't understand that reaction at all.
This really devolved into a two minutes of hate rally directed at the NRA.
