On New Day Saturday, CNN anchor Victor Blackwell gave a group of five students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School a forum with little pushback to not only advocate more gun control, but to accuse Republicans of being the ones who "murdered" the victims at their school in Parkland, Florida.
CNN even used a clip of one student repeating discredited claims that "There's been 18 mass shootings in schools this year," as she complained that "I didn't hear about them."
In a pre-recorded segment shown at 7:38 a.m. ET, Blackwell was seen posing: "You said that the governor and Senator Rubio murdered 17 people. Why?"
Student Cameron Kasky was then shown demonizing Republicans as he declared:
It's Rick Scott and Marco Rubio who allowed this to happen. They're enablers, and they -- the blood of 17 people and all those injured and all the families that have been hurt -- this is all them.
He soon added: "The GOP has abandoned us and left us to people like Nicolas Cruz."
After another student complained about House Speaker Paul Ryan benefiting from NRA spending, Blackwell mildly pushed back as he followed up:
Now, those who will disagree with the framing of what you just said and what we're hearing from others is that the NRA didn't purchase the gun -- the NRA didn't pull the trigger -- the NRA didn't conspire to kill.
Sawyer Garrity persisted in blaming the NRA as she responded:
They might not have pulled the trigger, but they're who allowed him to buy the gun. Someone who isn't even allowed to buy alcohol legally is allowed to buy a war weapon? Like, where does that make sense?
The CNN host should have included stronger pushback such as the results of research published in the Washington Post last year suggesting that new gun control would have hardly any effect in reducing the number of shootings in the U.S.
Just when it seemed like one student might be defending the Second Amendment, he ended up suggesting that "if we take small steps now that are plausible, maybe later we can actually take larger steps that will stop things from ever happening again."
Toward the end of the segment, there was a clip of another student repeating the bogus claim that there have been "18 mass shootings in schools" so far in 2018 -- which is based on a report by a liberal gun control group. Notably, even as this liberal group exaggerated how it defined a school shooting so that it could arrive at a larger number, its report did not refer to all 18 alleged shootings as being "mass shootings."
And yet CNN chose to include this piece of factually wrong information in a pre-recorded report where it could easily have been excluded.
