Rick Santorum, Fox News hosts criticize teen shooting survivors

Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg had a message for Rick Santorum after the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania  suggested teenagers who marched in Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities in support of stricter gun-control laws should learn CPR instead.

"If you take a bullet from an AR-15 to the head, no amount of CPR is going to save you, because you're dead," Hogg, 17, said on CNN's New Day on Monday morning. His comments came in response to remarks Santorum made on CNN's State of the Union Sunday.

"Is this really all about politics, or is this about keeping our schools safe?" Santorum asked on the show. "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 situation where there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?"

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Santorum's comments, suggesting that students who survived the massacre in Parkland, Fla., weren't taking action by marching and calling for stricter gun laws have been widely criticized by pundits, reporters, and survivors of the shooting itself.

"The fact that he's saying CPR when my friends are dying on our floor and nothing's being done about it is horrible," Lauren Hogg, David Hogg's sister and a fellow student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said on New Day. "I think he's just using it as a distraction to get the attention away from guns."

>> READ MORE: At Philly's March for Our Lives, calls to remember that gun violence is nothing new

After enduring a full day of criticism (including from many fellow CNN contributors and hosts), Santorum took to Twitter Monday afternoon in an attempt to clarify his comments, writing that "relying on more government to focus on guns is a mistake."

Santorum was among a number of people who criticized the teenage survivors of the Valentine's Day shooting, who turned the tragic death of 17 people into a nationwide rally involving hundreds of thousands of participants in cities like Washington and Philadelphia.

On Fox News Sunday morning, Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, who is reportedly being considered to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, told his co-hosts that the kids had the right to protest, but suggested they don't know enough to lecture anyone about the Second Amendment.

>> READ MORE: In D.C., hundreds from Philly protest gun violence: 'It gets to where it just hurts your heart'

"Forgive me if I don't want a lesson on the Second Amendment from a 16-year-old. Forgive me if I don't want to watch a 9-year-old tell me that her dream is a world without guns," Hegseth said, noting the anger displayed during the rally caused him to donate to the NRA. "They shouldn't be giving me lessons on the Second Amendment. They should be in civics class."

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Some pundits offered criticism of the students ahead of the marches. On Friday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Hogg and classmate Emma Gonzalez "extremists" for their desire to push for gun reforms, including universal background checks and banning the sale of assault rifles, that a majority of Americans support, according to a new poll by his own network.

On Fox Business Friday night, WPHT host and Daily News columnist Dom Giordano echoed Carlson's comments, calling some of the students simply "out of control."

"I have to say too … as an educator, there's a couple of these kids that are just rude in the way that they proceed here, as if they are bulletproof, so to speak," Giordano said. "But the media is almost laundering their own opinions through these kids."

A central target of the protests was the NRA. In a Facebook post Saturday morning, the NRA claimed "gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites" were exploiting the teenage survivors of the massacre as part of "a plan to destroy the Second Amendment."

>> READ MORE: March for Our Lives Philadelphia: The best signs from the rally

On NRATV, Noir host and gun-rights activist Colion Noir appeared to taunt the student survivors, saying he wished an armed guard would have stopped the deadly massacre because "your classmates would still be alive, and no one would know your names."

Noir, a pseudonym for Collins Iyare Idehen Jr., pointed to another recent shooting in Maryland, in which school resource officer Blaine Gaskill shot a 17-year-old male student after the student opened fire at Great Mills High School in Lexington Park.

But hours after Noir's video was posted, 16-year-old shooting victim Jaelynn Willey was taken off life support, dying from her injuries. A group of more than 100 students, alumni and teachers at Great Mills High School made the trip from St. Mary's County to Washington on Saturday to take part in the protests.

"After hitting so close to home, it becomes that much more real to us," Jillian Carty, 18, told the Baltimore Sun. "We want to be part of the movement to stop gun violence."