Marco Rubio Got Spit-Roasted by Constituents for 91 Consecutive Hours on CNN

A week after this country's latest mass shooting left 17 children dead, CNN televised a gun-safety town hall during which Florida voters had the opportunity to ask tough questions of, among other elected officials and gun-rights activists, Marco Rubio. And as has been true for pretty much everything that the state's junior senator has done over the past five years, the evening did not go well for him.

Microphone in hand, Fred Guttenberg—whose daughter Jaime was murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week—began by calling Rubio's response to the tragedy "pathetically weak," and he went on to ask if the senator would finally back an assault-weapons ban. Swallowing deeply, Rubio began saying words, which was his first and greatest mistake. "If I believed that that law would have prevented this from happening, I would support it," he answered as the audience gasped in equal parts disbelief and scorn. "But I want to explain to you why it would not."

Telling the father of a child whose daughter was killed by an assault weapon that an assault-weapons ban would have had no effect on the killer's ability to procure an assault weapon would be laughably facile if it weren't breathtakingly insulting. As boos rained down, Rubio went on to assert that this specific proposal's problem is that it would prohibit the sales of some assault rifles but not others, somehow ignoring the possibility that if a given proposal isn't broad enough, he, as a duly sworn United States senator, is perfectly capable of drafting a bill that could change that, if only he had the spine required to do so.

Guttenberg, as you might imagine, was having none of it. "It is too easy to get. It is a weapon of war," he said as Rubio nodded. "The fact that you can't stand with everyone in this building and say that? I'm sorry."

Later, Rubio proved unable to give a straight answer after a Parkland survivor asked him to decline future donations from the National Rifle Association, which has spent over $3 million to support his various candidacies for public office. "People buy into my agenda," he pleaded as the questioner politely reminded him that he could save everyone a lot of time by just saying no.

Incredibly, Rubio's insistence on clinging to the gun lobby came even as he expressed cautious support for legislation that would limit the availability of large-capacity magazines and raise the legal age to buy a rifle, which are policies that the NRA would sooner secede from these United States over and establish the Affiliated Territories of Gunlandia than support. The man can't even vacillate properly.

I cannot think of a politician in Washington right now who is more painfully aware of their crippling mediocrity than Marco Rubio, whose brief moment as a Republican presidential favorite now seems like it took place 12,000 years ago. (While we're here, spare me your praise of Rubio for "showing up" to the town hall, as if it constitutes some great act of moral courage for a public servant to show his face to his constituents.) Deep down, he often seems vaguely aware of his own hypocrisy, but he has no idea how to extricate himself from this problem of his own creation. And so when called to account, he wilts, much like a small child who didn't bother to prepare a book report but who also didn't comprehend the humiliation that would ensue until after he had been called to the front of the class.

The one positive to be gleaned from this experience is that what Marco Rubio says he wants tends to align nicely with whatever he perceives popular opinion to be. His evolving position on gun safety—assuming it lasts longer than this news cycle, which is by no means a given—is maybe the most promising sign yet that this time, unlike the other times that have come before it, our politicians might do something meaningful to ensure that what happened in Parkland doesn't happen again.