A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student pushed back on National Rifle Association (NRA) spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s claims that attendees screamed “burn her” after she spoke at a CNN town hall on last week’s deadly mass shooting at the school.
“As someone who was there front row, the crowd was not cheering ‘burn her’ as she walked off stage,” the student, whose name is Natasha, posted on Twitter. “We yelled ‘shame on you’ instead. Why does she insist on lying? Does she and the NRA feel threatened by us?”
In a Thursday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Loesch told the audience that as she left the town hall stage, attendees were screaming “burn her.”
{mosads}“I had to have a security detail to get out. I wouldn’t have been able to exit that if I didn’t have a private security detail,” Loesch said. “There were people rushing the stage and screaming ‘burn her.’”
“And I came there to talk solutions, and I still am going to continue that conversation on solutions as the NRA has been doing [since] before I was alive,” she said.
Video posted to Twitter after the town hall event shows Loesch being escorted out of the arena as audience members boo her and chant “shame on you.”
In her CPAC speech, Loesch also slammed the audience at the event for applauding when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) suggested the only way to keep individuals from taking advantage of gun law loopholes would be to ban all semi-automatic rifles.
“The government has proven that they cannot keep you safe. And yet, some people want all of us to disarm,” Loesch said. “You heard that town hall last night. They cheered the confiscation of firearms. And it was over 5,000 people.”
Loesch attended the town hall, which was broadcast on CNN, alongside Florida lawmakers and local officials.
During the event, she was challenged by the mother of one of the shooting victims, who asked Loesch why the NRA protects Second Amendment rights more than her son’s “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel also confronted Loesch during the event, telling her she is not standing up for victims of school shootings “until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”