During CNN's Wednesday night town hall with Florida lawmakers, survivors of last week's high school shooting and members of the NRA, Sen. Marco Rubio attempted to explain why a ban on assault rifles wouldn't have prevented the tragedy, and the audience's reaction was not quite what he was hoping for.
While explaining what a ban on assault rifles would do, the Republican senator from Florida said to ensure no one would “get around it.”
“You would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that’s sold in America.” A surprised Rubio, who appeared to have been hoping to convince the audience against such an idea, was met with a solid 10 seconds of applause that overwhelmed the room.
“Fair enough, fair enough,” the senator said as the cheers died down.
The moment came just after a grieving father called Rubio's reaction to the mass shooting "pathetically weak" and asked whether the senator would support banning assault rifles like Nikolas Cruz's AR-15 in order to save the lives of children.
“It’s too easy to get. It is a weapon of war,” the father emotionally said. “The fact that you can’t stand with everybody else in this building and say that, I’m sorry.”
A flustered Rubio assured him, “I do believe what you’re saying is true,” before launching into his argument against an assault rifles ban.
CNN's town hall follows last week's shooting at Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School where gunman Nikolas Cruz fatally shot 17 people and injured over a dozen more. In the time since, many of the school's surviving students have been commanding public attention and demanding a conversation about gun reform in the United States.