- One of the strangest things
about conversations involving guns in America,
is how quickly America goes from being
the most hopeful and almost impossible-chasing nation
to a nation that just believes
that nothing is possible all of a sudden.
You know?
Everything else America believes is possible.
We're like, "Oh, we're gonna go to the moon.
We're gonna go to Mars.
Oh, we're gonna cure cancer.
Oh, it doesn't mean we can't do it.
We can do it. We're gonna do it.
We're gonna do it. We're gonna...."
Then when it comes to guns, all of a sudden,
so many people are like, "It's impossible to stop it.
You just, you can't... There's so many.
Oh, what are you gonna do?
What are you gonna do?"
And what really frustrates me is how
people try and make it a game of whack-a-mole
when it comes to solving problems.
You know? You propose any type of solution
and they go, "Well that wouldn't have solved this one.
This wouldn't have stopped that."
And you're like, "Yeah, but that's not how solutions work."
There is no problem
that is going to be solved by one solution.
A lot of the time big problems require a multitude
of solutions, and what you do is you try
and fix it incrementally, step by step.
Every day you think of a new thing.
Look at cars, for instance Cars is a simple idea, right?
When they started off
it was like a bucket with wooden wheels.
You just crashed and you died.
(audience laughs)
That was it.
And then over time people said,
"Well, why don't we improve it?
Why don't we say it has to have brakes."
We never thought of brakes.
(audience laughs)
"Let's add that.
Let's add brakes and let's add this,
and let's add seat belts."
We've gotten to the point where cars drive themselves now
and still we say, "We've gotta write laws."
We still say, "Let's make sure
that the self-driving car adheres to certain standards,
let's make sure..."
It hasn't stopped.
And yet, somehow with guns, it just stopped?
It's such a strange argument for me.
"Oh. But that wouldn't have fixed it."
Yeah. But if you see a loophole,
why not fix it before it leads to a problem
that it could have stopped?
Do you know what I mean?
They always say the same thing.
"Oh, it's a slippery slope."
"Which guns do you ban?"
You know, like, "Which guns do you wanna ban?"
It's like, "We'll just start with the ones
that people seem to be using over and over again
to go into schools to kill a bunch of children at one time."
"Oh. But that won't... What if they come with a...?"
Yeah. Then we'll deal with that.
It's a lot harder to commit these mass shootings
when you don't have certain types of weapons.
I just, I really don't understand it.
People are like, "oh, it wouldn't fix it."
Yeah. Nothing fixes everything,
but you gotta start somewhere.
They almost use the gym argument. That's what it is.
You know, when you're trying to get in shape?
(audience laughs)
This one goes, "Why don't you work out?"
"Nah, I'm just not gonna change anything."
(audience laughs)
"Nah, pushups, don't help."
Yeah, pushups on their own don't help
and walking on its own doesn't help.
Drinking more water on its own doesn't help.
You combine these things, step by step, day by day.
And then you wake up one day and you're like,
"Well, wow. I look a little bit better than I did before.
I feel a little bit better than I did before."
It's not gonna happen overnight. It's incremental.
But it's really interesting that it's the one area
where so many people just wanna throw their hands up.
The same people, by the way, where when they first were told
that this was an undocumented immigrant, they were quick.
Yeah, they all of a sudden they were like,
"Oh, we, we gotta do something,
we've gotta shut down the borders. We've gotta...
This is why we need stricter..."
And then they were like,
"What? Oh no, it was, it was not?
Look. This is not the time to politicize things."
(audience laughs)
"We don't know what could have been done
and there's nothing that could have been done
and we gotta realize that bad people
are gonna do bad things."
Oh. But when you thought it was somebody
who came across the border illegally,
then you you said there was something you could do.
"Oh yeah. Well that, that, yeah."
(audience laughs)
And the saddest thing is it's a small group of people.
Most Americans are on the same page.
It's like a small group of people who've managed
to shift the Overton window on the conversation around guns.
Most gun owners are logical about this.
Like real gun owners go to the range and they shoot.
You should see how they respect weapons, you know?
They'll even be the ones who go like,
"Yeah, maybe we get rid of some of these guns
and maybe we change some of those laws and whatever."
But then there's this small little group, this lobby,
that manages to shift the entire conversation
in the country. We can't do it.
It's just like, okay, I think that's the end.
Okay. And it'll keep happening
until somebody makes a change.
But the one thing I say is you have to keep having hope.
You keep having hope, you keep fighting,
you keep pushing, you don't stop.
You know?
Like someone said to me recently about this conversation,
he's like, "Why do we bother?"
He's like, "Why do we keep having this conversation?"
I was like, "Hey man, I don't know.
Why did Martin Luther King, Jr. bother?
Why did Nelson Mandela bother?
Why did Mahatma Gandhi bother?
Why did Harriet Tubman bother?"
It's like, you have to keep bothering.
That's what hope is. Just wake up and you try again
and you try again and you try again and you try again.
And then one day you succeed or you die of old age.
(audience laughs)
That's life.
(audience claps)
(upbeat music)