Another charming moment from last night’s trainwreck via the Free Beacon. Why are they jeering? Tapper’s asking here about age limits on gun ownership, namely, can we really trust teenagers to use guns responsibly? To which Loesch says, well, we trust them to do so in the military. But if you don’t like that analogy because recruits get training in proper handling of weapons while the average 18-year-old gun owner might not, what about young adults who really do need them for self-defense? What about Kimberly Corban, says Loesch, who was raped before she turned 21 and has wished ever since that she had had when her assailant attacked?

The crowd starts to groan and laugh. What the fark are they laughing at?

Marco Rubio had to stand there politely while some kid called him a murderer yet CNN’s mob couldn’t listen quietly to Loesch make the case for self-defense using a real-world example involving rape. All victims are equal, but it seems some are more equal than others.

Loesch spoke at CPAC this morning and told the crowd that she wouldn’t have made it out of the venue last night without security. It would have been the perfect ironic ending to the evening if CNN’s feral crowd, enraged at random violence, had physically attacked an unarmed gun advocate after she got done trying to explain why women might need weapons to defend themselves.

“I want to make this super obvious point,” Loesch said. “The government has proven that they cannot keep you safe. And yet, some people want all of us to disarm. You heard that town hall last night. They cheered the confiscation of firearms. And it was over 5,000 people.”

“I had to have a security detail to get out,” she said of the Sunland, Fla. event. “I wouldn’t be able to exit that if I didn’t have a private security detail. There were people rushing the stage and screaming burn her. And I came there to talk solutions and I still am going to continue that conversation on solutions as the NRA has been doing since before I was alive.”

Interesting point, Mark Hemingway:

https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/966732110366208001

You can watch Loesch’s full CPAC speech below. It is indeed a stemwinder, as Ed said to me in an email, which I suppose is what’s called for at CPAC, although it sure does contrast with her tone last night. Her big line is “Many in legacy media love mass shootings,” which, she quickly adds, doesn’t mean that they love seeing people killed, only that they love the ratings that follow. Okay, but that’s quite a provocation, just like that kid’s sneer at Rubio was a provocation last night. Meanwhile, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre followed her onstage and started ranting about “elites” and “European socialists” in the Democratic Party and all manner of other red-meat goodies for the CPAC faithful. Various righties and even some lefties like Chris Hayes observed this morning that the NRA would be on firmer ground politically right now if they had taken a more low-key, bipartisan, narrowly focused approach to their core issue over the last decade or so, as that would have left some pro-gun Democrats in their ranks to defend them from progressives. But they’ve gone all-in on culture war, especially with Trump in the White House and major gun grabs momentarily not in the cards. Too bad. I hope gun-rights supporters generally don’t end up paying a political price because of antipathy to the NRA specifically.