Cameron Kasky, a survivor of February’s mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., recently left the student gun-control group March for Our Lives and now claims he regrets that he was “propped up as an expert” by the media in the wake of the tragedy.
“My whole message is I was propped up as an expert. The whole message was these kids are the real experts,” Kasky told Fox News Radio’s Benson & Harf on Wednesday. “Look, I have some very intelligent friends. Some friends who can intellectually run circles around me, but I’m not the expert in pretty much anything.”
Survivors of the Parkland shooting received wall-to-wall cable-news coverage in its aftermath. Kasky gained national notoriety after telling Senator Marco Rubio of Florida that looking at him felt like looking “down the barrel of an AR-15,” during a town hall weeks after the shooting. Kasky now claims to regret that interaction and says he hopes to meet with Rubio to apologize.
After leaving March for Our Lives, the student-led gun-control-advocacy group he helped found after the shooting, Kasky said his time traveling across the country with the group on a speaking tour helped him better understand the perspective of gun owners.
“This summer when March For Our Lives went on the summer tour that we embarked on, I met that person in Texas who’s got that semi-automatic weapon because that’s how they like to protect their family,” he said. “I met the 50 some-odd percent of women who are pro-life, even though I thought it was preposterous that a woman could be pro-life and not pro-choice at the time.”
The 17-year-old now plans to start his own podcast, Cameron Knows Nothing, featuring subject-matter experts as part of his mission to change the way he participates in the public debate surrounding gun control and other politically charged issues.