Singer and National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent on Friday criticized the high school students who have become gun control advocates after surviving the mass shooting at their school in Parkland, Florida, in February.
"The level of ignorance goes beyond stupidity," Nugent said in a radio interview. He continued:
The dumbing down of America is manifested in the culture deprivation of our academia that have taught these kids the lies, media that have prodded and encouraged and provided these kids lies. I really feel sorry for them because it's not only ignorant and dangerously stupid, but it's soulless. To attack the good law-abiding families of America when well known predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless. These poor children — I'm afraid to say this and it hurts me to say this — but the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul. [Ted Nugent, via Media Matters]
Nugent has a long record of similar rhetoric. In 2012, for example, he said he would "either be dead or in jail by this time next year" were then-President Obama re-elected. In 2014, after a Native American casino canceled his show on grounds of his "racist attitudes," he called his critics "unclean vermin" who don't "actually qualify as people."