-Republicans, the gun lobby, and Fox News
are once again lying and making ridiculous excuses
for why they oppose wildly popular gun safety measures
after two horrific mass shootings
in the span of less than a week.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
As we slowly emerge from the grip of one deadly plague
that's ravaged the country for the past year, the coronavirus,
we're once again being confronted
with yet another deadly plague
that has haunted this country for decades,
the plague of gun violence.
And in both cases, there's been a small minority
of sociopaths with outsized power in our politics
who stand in the way whenever the rest of us
try to do something about it.
They've been too busy melting down about Dr. Seuss
or the Looney Tunes or Potato Head dolls.
Next, they're gonna start whining
that the Biden administration is trying to outlaw PEZ.
You can have my Spider-Man dispenser
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
Not my PEZ-ident!
In fact, on Monday, Fox News barely covered
the horrific Boulder shootings in prime time.
Sean Hannity opened his show by briefly mentioning it
and then quickly moved on to something
that he apparently considered much more important.
-We start tonight, a Fox News alert --
Tonight authorities responded to a shooting
at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
Officials are currently, right this moment,
holding a press conference.
We have our reporters on the ground.
We'll bring you the details as they emerge tonight.
We start tonight and turn to Joe Biden,
who after falling not once, not twice, but three times
trying to climb the stairs on Friday,
enjoying a restful weekend
with zero public events on Saturday and Sunday.
-That's grim.
Hannity's a guy who would watch "Manchester by the Sea"
and then be upset to find out there's no blooper reel.
"I know it was a sad movie, but you're telling me
there weren't any on-set goofs or mix-em-ups?"
And, Sean, no one's happier than I am
that after a president
who fell upward his whole life metaphorically,
we ended up with one who somehow did it literally.
Three times.
But, my God, get your priorities straight.
10 people were murdered in a mass shooting in Boulder
less than a week after eight people were murdered
in a mass shooting in Atlanta,
a hate crime that killed six Asian women
amid a horrific nationwide rise in anti-Asian hate crimes.
And on top of all that,
there's also the more than half a million
who've died from a pandemic that's still raging.
And your top story
is the president tripping on the stairs?
How's that gonna go over with your sponsors?
Aren't most of them stair-lift companies?
And then the next night, Hannity attacked Democrats
for supposedly rushing to, you know, do something about it.
-Democrats now rushing
to capitalize on yesterday's horrific mass shooting
without any details, as usual.
Thank you for standing up for our Constitution
and the Second Amendment,
because apparently many are not tonight,
and Joe Biden's threatening executive action.
-Well, Sean, that's exactly right,
and the modern-day left is more and more extreme.
-Ted Cruz looks like he got canned from his job
at the mythical creature temp agency
for stealing office supplies.
"I'm sorry, Ted, but we're gonna have to let you go.
You stole a bunch of pens, and the yeti types faster."
Second, you guys repeat the same bull[bleep] line
every time we go through this awful ritual
that gun safety advocates
are somehow rushing to politicize it.
First of all, we have an epidemic of gun violence
that killed more than 19,000 people last year alone.
A majority of Americans want gun safety reforms,
including universal background checks, mandatory gun licenses,
and a ban on semiautomatic weapons.
It's the politicians and their patrons in the gun lobby
that are holding those up.
Second, the people who suddenly decry politics
when a shooting happens
are the same people who put guns in their political ads,
or proudly display guns in their backgrounds
during political events,
like they're Zooming in from a remote hideout in the woods
during a zombie apocalypse.
I mean, look at this. That's insane.
I don't care how you feel about guns.
Casually showing off a bunch of killing machines
like this is demented.
If I accidentally found a room like this at a dinner party,
I would make an excuse and leave.
"Did you find the bathroom okay?"
"Uh, you know, I did.
Also, honey, the babysitter called,
and the boys are not feeling well, so we should --"
"Oh, no, you went right at the end of the hallway
instead of left, didn't you?"
"No, no, no, no, no, no, I only went left.
I only saw a bathroom.
The boys, though, honey, they're very sick.
We should go. It's diarrhea."
"No one is going anywhere!
Oh, Cyrus, when will you put a lock on the gun room door?"
And lastly, let's dispense with this ridiculous lie
that has become canon on the right
that standing up to any sensible gun safety legislation
means standing up for the Second Amendment.
It's one of the greatest cons in the history of politics.
For most of American history,
the idea that the Second Amendment
guarantees an individual right to own whatever gun you want
was never even contemplated.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger
famously called it a fraud.
-If I were writing the Bill of Rights now,
there wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment.
-Which says?
-That a well-regulated militia
being necessary for the defense of the state,
people's right to bear arms.
This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces
of fraud -- I repeat the word fraud --
on the American public by special interest groups
that I have ever seen in my lifetime.
Now, just look at those words.
There are only three lines to that amendment.
"A well-regulated militia."
If the militia, which was going to be the state army,
was gonna be well-regulated,
why shouldn't 16 and 17 and 18 or any other age persons
be regulated in the use of arms?
-That point is so blindingly obvious,
it's shocking we even have to debate it.
When the amendment was written,
even the militia was supposed to be well-regulated.
Do you think the founders would look at this and say,
"That's exactly what we meant"?
And that's not even taking into account that the founders
could never have conceived of the weapons we have now.
In their day, it took nine minutes to load a gun,
and half the time, you pulled the trigger,
and it just went "ppfff" and the shot fell out on your shoe.
Those dorks were tying keys to kites
to learn about electricity.
If you let Ben Franklin fire an AR-15,
he would [bleep] his burlap yoga pants.
"Deborah, I invented electricity!"
"Invent some better pants, Ben!"
[Bleep] hilarious, but his wife was named Deborah.
I would have thought the first Deborah was born in like 1940.
Or how about private sales of guns, like at gun shows,
which often don't even require background checks,
a loophole the vast majority of Americans want closed?
Watch this clip and ask yourself
whether the people who wrote the Second Amendment
would consider this well-regulated.
-If you buy a gun from someone
in the business of dealing in firearms,
federal law requires background checks.
But the private dealers are not legally required
to conduct background checks.
-I would ask you for a Virginia driver's license.
That way I know you're from within the state.
-But if I gave you a fake Virginia driver's license,
you would never know? -I would have no idea.
-Would you trust me? Do I have an honest face?
Would you sell it to me? -I'd trust you.
Think you have an honest face. -Okay, but that being said,
sometimes if you don't think someone has an honest face,
if you have a bad vibe, you don't sell it?
-Correct. -That's right.
All you need to buy a gun in this country is an honest face.
We better hope to God Paul Rudd never decides to raise an army
and overthrow the U.S. government.
By the way, that dude's almost two years older than Ted Cruz.
That's what happens when you moisturize your face
instead of your hair.
Paul Rudd would have to spend seven hours in a makeup chair
to look like a man 20 months his junior.
The idea that the Second Amendment
guarantees an individual right to own a gun
unconnected with service in a militia,
an idea that was codified in 2008
by the conservative majority in the disastrous Heller decision,
is, to borrow Warren Burger's phrasing, a fraud.
In fact, the argument is so absurd that in 1982,
Senate Republicans issued a report
claiming to have discovered...
I'm sorry, long-lost proof?
Was it written in invisible ink on the back of the Constitution?
Or did you discover a secret stone tablet
hidden inside the Liberty Bell?
Did Nic Cage find this for you?
Because while he is clearly one of our greatest living actors,
I thought we had established a bipartisan consensus
that we cannot trust the veracity
of this man's long-lost documents.
[ As Nicolas Cage ] The Constitution says yes on guns,
and I was given up for adoption by a velociraptor.
And, yeah, I know my current haircut
looks like Samberg's Nic Cage wig.
[ Normal voice ] Again, as Warren Burger put it, it's a fraud.
And, of course, the NRA is no stranger to fraud,
given that it is currently bankrupt
as the state of New York pursues a fraud case
against the organization.
NRA officials allegedly conned their members out of millions
by fundraising off the Second Amendment
and then using that money on, among other things...
These guys treated the NRA bank account
like it was the Showcase Showdown
on "The Price Is Right."
The simple fact is,
it is too easy to get a gun in this country
and we have far too many of them.
Keep in mind that the U.S.
has about 4% of the world's population,
and yet it also has...
And I appreciate that they crunched the numbers,
but the fact that we even need
a sophisticated statistical analysis
to tell us there's a connection between how many guns we have
and how many gun deaths we have is insane.
If you eat a bunch of chili dogs
and then ride the Cyclone for an hour,
you don't need a quantum physicist
to tell you why you barfed all over your date.
Maybe it's because I get nervous around the opposite sex?
That's not it, pal.
There is a very obvious connection here.
Every analysis, every graph correlating guns and gun deaths
tells us that.
And there are proven solutions we could implement.
Famously, Australia confiscated 650,000 guns.
Murders and suicides plummeted.
And yet every time another one
of these horrific shootings happen,
the same awful ritual plays out.
The overwhelming majority of Americans
say they support commonsense gun safety measures,
like universal background checks, mandatory gun licenses,
or a ban on assault weapons.
And then there's the other hand,
a much smaller faction of callous sociopaths,
who lose their minds at even the suggestion
that we should maybe make it just a little harder
to buy a gun in this country.
-Every time there's a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater
where this committee gets together
and proposes a bunch of laws
that would do nothing to stop these murders.
-Oh, I'm sorry, Ted Cruz.
Are we keeping you from something more important?
Are you supposed to be on spring break in Cancún
holding the beer bong for a bunch of sophomores
from Michigan State?
You don't get to call anything ridiculous theater
after you jetted off to Cancún during a deadly blackout,
then flew back for a photo op where you handed out water,
then jetted off again to Orlando
for the Conservative Political Action Conference.
That photo op was such ridiculous theater,
I'm shocked you didn't get cast on Broadway.
Tonight, the role of Mr. Mistoffelees
will be played by Ted Cruz!
And the good news is, even that wouldn't make "Cats" any worse.
And, by the way, these guys don't even have a coherent logic
for why they oppose gun safety measures
supported by the vast majority of Americans.
Just listen to Louisiana senator John Kennedy
accidentally make the argument for gun safety reforms
at yesterday's hearing.
-I'm not trying to perfectly equate these two, but...
We have a lot of drunk drivers in America
that kill a lot of people.
We ought to -- We ought to try to combat that, too.
But I think what many folks on my side of the aisle are saying
is that the answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers.
-Great idea, Senator.
Let's treat guns like automobiles.
You have to take a test and get a license
before you can use one.
You have to register it with the government,
and the cops can take it away if you use it irresponsibly
or if you leave it on the wrong side of the street
from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. on Thursdays.
Imagine if every time you accidentally committed
even the tiniest infraction with a gun they towed it like a car
and the only way to get it back was to take the F train
down to a lot in a part of Brooklyn you've never heard of
called East Coney Island Heights
that only exists for like one magical week every 100 years
and then pay a $1,000 fine to a guy in a tiny booth
who only accepts euros or camel cash
and doesn't seem to have any sympathy
for the fact that you were only parked illegally
for five minutes to run into the only goddamn café
in New York City that makes a matcha latte
up to your wife's impossible standards.
"Buddy!
Buddy, can you hear me?
Can you hear me through the glass?
Buddy!"
Most gun owners would be like, "Forget it. Keep my gun."
But there you go -- Kennedy said let's treat guns like cars.
Fine by me.
Introduce your legislation and let's get it passed.
Of course, it won't surprise you to learn
that he immediately backed off that
and downgraded to a new, dumber proposal.
-In my judgment, we do not need more gun control.
We need more idiot control.
-You know, your fake folksy schtick isn't fooling anyone.
This guy went to Oxford,
so when he comes out hee-hawing and chewing on a weed,
it's a little like watching Damian Lewis in "Billions."
We know you're British.
You can eat as much pizza pie as you like.
We know you're British.
And you're wonderful.
But if you really think we need idiot control,
how about we start with the party that elected the guy
who thought you could cure coronavirus
by shooting bleach up your nose with a turkey baster
or the guy who thinks snowballs disprove global warming
or the congresswoman who wore a "censored" mask
while speaking into a microphone on television
on the floor of the United States Congress
or the senator who thinks -- and this is real --
that Greenland got its name because it used to be green.
That is a real thing Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson said.
Not when he was 9, which would have been adorable,
but this month, when he told "The New York Times"...
Sure, dude, that's how Greenland got its name.
Just like how Germany got its name
because that's where germs come from
or how Canada got its name
because everyone there loves ginger ale.
And like, ha ha, Ron Johnson's dumb.
But it's worse than that.
He was using that disprovable fact
to argue that climate change isn't real
because Greenland used to be green.
It wasn't just a wrong answer he was giving on "Idiot Jeopardy."
And, by the way, just a reminder to all you pro-gun con artists
once again claiming it's the so-called radical left
rushing to take away everyone's gun.
The most recent president
who actually said we should take people's guns away
wasn't Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
It was this guy.
-Allow due process so no one's rights are trampled,
but the ability to go to court, obtain an order,
and then collect not only the firearms,
but any weapons in the possession --
-Or might take the firearms first and then go to court.
Because that's another system.
Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court,
it takes so long to go to court,
to get the due process procedures.
I like taking the guns early.
So you could do exactly what you're saying
but take the guns first, go through due process second.
-I like taking the guns early.
No Democratic president has ever even come close
to saying something like that.
And without due process, no less.
Mike Pence must have thought he was having a fever dream.
"Oh, God, someone must have spiked my milk
with 2% milk from the devil's teat!"
The GOP and its allies
in the right-wing media and the gun lobby
are at odds with the vast majority of Americans
who have said in poll after poll
they want this senseless epidemic
of horrific gun violence to stop.
There are proven solutions we could implement,
and there are bills the Senate could pass right now
that would make a difference.
But despite the fact that a majority of Americans
want those solutions and want gun violence to stop,
one of our two major parties are under what you might call...
-Idiot control.
-This has been [As John Kennedy] "A Closer Look."
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