Florida senator Marco Rubio was grilled about his views on gun control before a stadium-sized live audience on CNN on Wednesday night. Some of the questions and comments were tough and smart; others were viciously ad hominem and stupid. But Rubio stood there and articulated why he opposed the federal assault weapons ban and explained where he was willing to revisit gun laws. Rubio said he’s open to limiting the size of magazines to marginally reduce the death toll of massacres, backs gun-violence restraining orders, and supports raising the age limit for buying rifles to 21 (which is the age required to buy handguns). “We’re going very strongly at age of purchase,” President Trump said earlier Wednesday.
Politicians can and should be asked tough questions in difficult settings, but the discussion would have been more edifying without a large audience heckling and interrupting with boos, cheers, and chants. To be clear, I don’t blame people who have gone through a traumatic event for an emotional reaction. But the format was a problem. Even if every question had been asked by the same questioners (who were victims and their family members), the event would have been better if it hadn’t turned into such a spectacle. It also would have helped if the Democrats on stage, Senator Bill Nelson and Congressman Ted Deutch, had been pressed more precisely by someone other than Marco Rubio about which kinds of guns they want to ban—a question they successfully dodged. Do they still want most semi-automatic rifles and handguns with 10-round magazines legal? Exactly which types of guns should a 19-year-old woman be able to possess to protect herself from rapists?
All in all, it’s good for the media to force politicians to answer tough questions. The problem is not that Rubio was asked tough questions to defend conservative policies, it’s that all too often politicians are not asked similarly tough questions to defend liberal policies.
Take, for example, the media’s treatment of Texas state senator Wendy Davis a couple months after abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted of multiple murders in 2013 for killing born-alive infants with a pair of scissors.
Davis stood and spoke for 11 hours in an ultimately failed effort to block a bill that would protect the lives of healthy, viable infants from the fifth month of pregnancy onward. (The Texas law includes an exception for a “severe fetal abnormality” that is “incompatible with life outside the womb,” so the law didn’t even prohibit those tough cases cited by supporters of a right to late-term abortion.)
During a round of Sunday show interviews on CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS after her stunt, Davis was not asked to explain the difference between the Gosnell murders and the abortions she wanted to keep legal—something she, like Nancy Pelosi, could not explain later when questioned by TWS. Instead, she was treated as a hero and asked about the pink running shoes she stood in during her failed filibuster. Really. Go read the 20 questions she was asked during her Sunday-show jaunt.
Let me hasten to add that I’m not promoting what’s been derided as “whataboutism.” The problem with “whataboutism” involves either drawing a false equivalence or deflecting from an issue at hand because of real hypocrisy (“We can’t talk about Donald Trump assaulting women because Ted Kennedy got a pass after leaving a woman to drown”).
Republicans should not get a pass on guns because Democrats get a pass from the media on abortion. This is simply a call for the media to be better, to question liberal premises the same way they question conservative premises—on guns, abortion, and everything else.
