On his May 9th morning show, Elvis Duran reflected on a piece of video he saw of CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin interviewing a 12-year-old student of STEM School Highland Ranch about his experience hiding in his classroom during the May 7th shooting that left 1 student dead and 8 others injured. The young boy explained that as he crouched in a closet, surrounded by his classmates, he kept his hand on a metal bat because if he was going to go down, he wanted to go down fighting.
Duran opened to his co-hosts, Danielle Monaro and Medha Gandhi, about how saddened he was at the boy's natural inclination to bring up 'go down fighting' and the loss of childhood innocence for so many kids who have to deal with the reality of school violence.
"When you hear a 12-and-a-half year-old boy say, 'I grabbed a metal bat because I was ready to go down with what was going down,' WOW." He continued with questions for his co-hosts about their lives when they were the same age as the young student being interviewed, "Look at the difference between the world now and the world then. That's why now, more than ever, we need to be nice to each other. I know it sounds so cakey and so fluffy. It does. Find every opportunity you can to lift people up and make them feel good. I don't want this kid to think that this is the world you gotta live in where you're about to go down and you have to grab a bat. At 12-years-old I was eating my boogers. You should't have to think about grabbing a bat to go down because someone is shooting up a classroom."
He went on to discuss the need to for change for guns and mental health at a higher level and the importance of letting kids be kids.
"We need to be innocent kids no matter how old we are."
Listen to the full Elvis Duran and the Morning Show on-air conversation below.
Source: Getty Images