Kimmel and Noah, you aren’t helping
In an emotional opening to his show Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel cried as he spoke about the Las Vegas shooting. He said the shooter was a seemingly normal accountant with no arrest history or mental problems and was able to legally obtain weapons.
“Second Amendment, I guess,” Kimmel said.
He described semiautomatics as “weapons designed to kill large numbers of people,” as if anyone who owns one is a potential mass murderer, and then located his real targets, Republicans.
He brought up a bill President Trump signed in February ostensibly making it easier for people with mental illness to buy guns. The bill, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of disability groups, corrected an Obama-era wrong that tied being able to handle Social Security finances to gun ownership.
Kimmel then called out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan for sending prayers and adds, “They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”
It’s the same after every mass shooting. The divisive message from Hollywood is loud and clear: If you’re a conservative, if you’re a gun owner, if you don’t agree with our exact policy prescriptions, whether or not they would change anything, we can’t grieve together, you are not a part of this. You are the monsters who have caused this. It isn’t the shooter’s fault; the blood of the victims are on the hands of Republicans for not passing some mythical bill that would contain just the right law to stop this shooting and all the others.
Never mind that a Pew Research poll in June found that 42% of Americans either own a gun or live in a household with a gun. Are they all Republican?
Keeping with the theme over on the Comedy Channel, Trevor Noah on The Daily Show said he had “never been to a country where people are as afraid to speak about guns.”
He must have different Facebook friends than most of us. Plenty of people are talking about guns. They might not be saying what Noah hopes they’d say, but fear is not the issue. He ended his segment talking about a gun bill Congress will vote on and apologized to the people of Las Vegas that there are people who will put guns before their lives. Because if there isn’t a cheap shot at Republicans at the end of it, what’s all this comedy really about?
There is no, pardon the expression, magic bullet to end gun violence. If there were, everyone would want to do it. We don’t exist in the world liberals imagine where conservatives wake up to a tragedy like this and don’t feel anguished and devastated by it. There have been no workable solutions proposed, and certainly not by the Jimmy Kimmels and Trevor Noahs of the world.
It’s hard to wrap our minds around random violence, especially well-thought out violence like this that left its victims defenseless. It’s so much easier to direct hatred and rage at the political party you oppose than to admit our ideas are limited. “Let’s do something,” goes the refrain, and few people, gun owners and Republicans included, disagree. It’s the “what” we can do that causes division. And that’s what Kimmel and Noah help sow.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist based in Brooklyn.