If the past three decades have taught us anything, it’s that in the wake of any school shooting—especially a highly publicized one—Republicans will offer up just as many ridiculous reasons for why the shooting happened as they do “thoughts and prayers.” On Tuesday night, Trevor Noah was almost amused by the tidal wave of batshit excuses lawmakers had for how a Uvalde, Texas teen with a gun could kill 21 innocent people with that gun, and yet still never blame America’s rampant gun problem.
“While most Americans, liberals and conservatives, are open to common sense restrictions on guns to keep Americans safe,” Noah said, “there is still a small yet powerful group of gun f**ks who believe the problem with gun violence is not because of guns. No, it’s because of everything else.”
Among the many scapegoats cited were: the internet, video games, movies, and music. It’s an argument Noah says “totally falls apart when you realize the entire world listens to American music and plays American video games. Yeah, but they have nowhere the same level of America’s mass shootings. And don’t get it twisted, it’s the same music. It’s not like, in Sweden, Snoop Dogg is like ‘Rat-tat-tat-tat, and I never hesitate to put a hat on a ca–aaat.’ It’s the same music. Why aren’t they getting the same results?”
While Noah understands that lawmakers “want to blame anything but guns, it still has to make sense. Can we agree on that? You can’t just blame stuff that you were already mad at… And if it’s not religion and it’s not video games and it’s not the music, what else could it be?”
While Ted Cruz is sticking to his story that 19 children are dead in Uvalde because of doors, many Republicans are dusting off their favorite chestnut: The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Except in the case of Robb Elementary School, Noah says, “there wasn’t just an armed resource officer on the scene. There was a whole platoon of police officers who responded to the shooting but didn’t do sh*t to stop it while it was still going on. And I’m willing to guess it was because they were also sh*t scared of a gunman armed with an AR-15.”
You can watch Noah’s full clip above.