Late Night Tackles Guns
Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah offer thoughts, not jokes, about the weekend's mass shootings
It was "another weekend of sadness and outrage in the United States, we had two more mass shootings," in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday's Kimmel Live. "And again, our leaders, in one party in particular, are offering not much more than their thoughts and their prayers. And you know, I was thinking and praying about it, and both parties say one thing: That we're too divided. ... Well, here's something we can agree on: Too many people are being shot with high-powered weapons."
"And we agree on this, too: They did a poll last year, and 97 percent of gun owners — these are gun owners — support universal background checks," Kimmel said. "But the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — this evil, soulless old creep — won't even allow the Senate to vote on a bipartisan bill to require background checks for gun purchases at gun shows."
He's not alone. "Yesterday, 49 Republican members of Congress refused to go on CNN to talk about the shootings," Kimmel said. "Now, the cops in Dayton ran into the line of fire to stop the guy shooting; the politicians were too cowardly to go on cable television to talk about it." Meanwhile, President Trump couldn't correctly identify Dayton as the Ohio city where one of the mass shootings happened, but he and other Republicans did "point that little finger of blame" at the news media and then video games, Kimmel said. "They play video games all over the world. This is the only place that this happens regularly. Video games have not been linked to gun violence, but you know what is linked to gun violence? Guns are linked to gun violence."
The post-mass-shooting finger-pointing at anything other than guns "fundamentally" misses "the human element of what people are fighting for in America, and that is trying," Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show. "All these other things that people bring up still have a country that tries stop them," he said, mentioning the efforts to reduce medical errors, car accidents, and airline tragedies. "America tries, man. ... It's not about perfect, it's about trying to be more perfect."
"The Second Amendment, fundamentally — fundamentally, if you think about it — is about protecting human beings," Noah said. "What is the good of writing a law that now protects the guns as opposed to the human beings that it's supposed to protect?" Watch below. Peter Weber