Marco Rubio: Parkland survivors 'have done more in five weeks than has been done in 15 years'

The families of the Parkland shooting victims have done more to enact gun safety legislation in the five weeks since the 14 February massacre than others have in more than a decade, Florida senator Marco Rubio has said.

Speaking to the Guardian on the eve of Saturday’s March for Our Lives in Washington, Rubio credited the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting with forcing action on Capitol Hill – without politicizing the debate beyond repair.

“They’ve done more in five weeks on gun violence than has been done in 15 years,” he said. “The parents have come together, all 17, even though they don’t always agree. They aren’t out there saying, ‘Don’t vote for anything unless we have everything’.”

But Rubio also warned against the increasingly partisan nature of the guns debate, which he said could halt the momentum behind a new spirit of bipartisan compromise on issues that include gun violence restraining orders and raising the minimum age restrictions for purchasing firearms.

“The attitude of total victory -- the idea that somehow some of us are going to come up here and get everything we want and just run over the other side -- our system is just not set up for that,” Rubio said.

“We’re creating unrealistic expectations and, in the process, nothing happens.”

The Republican senator rejected in particular the notion that an assault weapons ban should serve as a litmus test, suggesting such an approach was neither pragmatic nor productive.

Rubio was interviewed as part of the guest-editing of the Guardian US site by student journalists from the Eagle Eye, the newspaper of Stoneman Douglas. The students requested the interview with the Florida senator because they particularly wanted to put questions directly to lawmakers from both parties as part of the collaboration.

Rubio sat down with the Guardian on Capitol Hill on Thursday, shortly after unveiling a so-called “red flag” bill, which would encourage states to adopt policies allowing law enforcement officials or family members to file gun restraining orders to remove firearms from potentially violent individuals.

Rubio’s home state of Florida, as well as a handful of others, have enacted such laws. Orlando police have already credited the law with preventing a potential mass shooting.

Congress also appeared close to sending a spending bill to Donald Trump’s desk, which included measures that would: reverse a ban on gun violence research; and amend the existing background checks system. Rubio is a co-sponsor of the latter proposalwhich does not close loopholes for private sales or purchases at gun shows but tightens measures to ensure that states and federal agencies are actually entering the proper records into the federal background check system.

Rubio said he remains supportive of further gun controls, such as raising the age restriction for purchasing some firearms from 18 to 21, but he predicted it would take longer to corral enough votes. The senator also suggested he was open to new limits on high capacity magazines but had yet to coalesce around a specific proposal.

“I’ve tried to rank these things, not just in order of how quickly we can pass them, but how effective they would be,” Rubio said. “I believe the most effective thing we can do to prevent gun violence is to identify potential attackers and stop them before they act.”

Rubio had a meteoric rise as a young senator, but his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last year came to a halt when Donald Trump beat him in his home state primary.

Rubio subsequently chose to seek re-election to the Senate, reversing an earlier pledge to leave Congress. In doing so, he cited in part another mass shooting in Florida – the June 2016 attack at the LGBT Orlando nightclub Pulse.

That shooting, as with the spate of others since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, failed to produce any new laws in Washington.

After Pulse, in which an alleged Islamic State sympathizer gunned down 49 people and wounded 58 others, Rubio proposed legislation that would make it more difficult for suspected terrorists to purchase firearms. The proposal went nowhere in the Senate.

As a 2016 presidential candidate, Rubio positioned himself as a staunch proponent of the second amendment right to bear arms. Critics have been quick to point to the roughly $3.3m Rubio has received from the National Rifle Association’s political arm as evidence of the gun lobby’s influence over his posture toward gun control.

Rubio has insisted his donors do not dictate his agenda, but rather buy into it, and refused to commit to no longer taking money from the NRA when he was put on the spot on live television by a Parkland student during last month’s CNN town hall.

He chafed at the notion that his approach to the gun debate was shaped by the NRA line, telling the Guardian he found the relentless focus on one group counterproductive to bipartisan talks.

“That’s a terrible way to judge public policy – an idea is either a good idea or a bad idea,” Rubio said. “This fixation on one group versus another group in our debate … I get why people are out there doing it for political purposes, but in my view we should judge ideas by whether they work or don’t work – not by who supports them or who opposes them.”

Some of the Parkland students disagree with Rubio’s line of defense. David Hogg, one of the more high-profile activists in the aftermath of the shooting, called out Rubio by name during a Thursday press conference on Capitol Hill.

‘If you want to continue to be supported by the NRA, like Marco Rubio, that’s OK,” Hogg said, “Because we’ll vote you out. It’s as simple as that.”

Rubio, who has met with several of the Parkland families, said it was the right of the voters to force out lawmakers whose record they found to be lacking. But he disputed the notion that his ideas were workshopped through the NRA.

Rubio pointed to a proposal he is pushing that was advocated by Sandy Hook Promise, a group formed after the tragedy in Newtown. A version of the legislation, known as the STOP School Violence Act, was passed by the House of Representatives last week and would offer federal grants to states to strengthen school security and bolster school training to identify potential threats.

Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter Alaina JoAnn Petty died in the Parkland shooting, said Rubio had personally engaged with several families of the Parkland victims and visited their home while developing his response.

“We are aligned on the idea that we need to focus on common values and ideas and craft legislation that addresses those commonalities first,” Petty told the Guardian.

“After every mass shooting, we inevitably devolve in to a debate over the meaning of the second amendment, its meaning and applicability to modern America,” he added. “Legislatively, it’s a road to nowhere.”