March For Our Lives founder leaves group, says he regrets trying to ’embarrass’ Rubio

A student who co-founded the March For Our Lives movement calling for stricter gun laws in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting says he has left the group and regrets trying to “embarrass” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) about gun-control.

“I left the organization and if I thought that my friends and the people I worked with couldn’t do it without me I would not have done that,” Cameron Kasky told Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson in an interview Wednesday.

Kasky, who was among several students who began advocating for gun control in the wake of the February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said that he is “very regretful of a lot of the mistakes that I made along the way.”

{mosads}He expressed regret about how he handled an exchange with Rubio during a live town hall televised on CNN shortly after 17 students and faculty died when a former student opened fire at the school.

Kasky told Rubio at the town hall, “Sen. Rubio, it’s hard to look at you and not look down a barrel of an AR-15 and not look at Nikolas Cruz, but the point is you’re here and there are some people who are not.”

He then questioned Rubio aggressively for taking money from the National Rifle Association.

“I look back on that and I say, you know what, there were people who had just been buried and when you’re looking at somebody that you find might in some way have been complicit in this murderer obtaining the weapon it’s hard not to say something like that,” Kasky said Wednesday. “But, I went into that wanting less conversation and more to embarrass Rubio and that was my biggest flaw.”

Kasky said he did not regret trying to put Rubio “on the spot” – expressing his frustration with politicians not offering direct responses to questions – but said he should not have invoked the alleged shooter’s name.

He also said that he came to appreciate views that are different than his during his time with March For Our Lives.

“This summer when March For Our Lives went on the summer tour that we embarked on I met that person in Texas whose got that semi-automatic weapon because that’s how they like to protect their family,” Kasky told Fox News Radio. “I met the 50 some odd percent of woman 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.”

“I learned that a lot of our issues politically come from a lack of understanding of other perspectives,” he added.