Last week, mere days after the worst K-12 school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012, the NRA held their annual convention. They could have cancelled it, out of respect for the dead, including 19 children and two teachers. They could even have softened the rhetoric. They did not. Ted Cruz admonished fellow conservatives who peaced out. Donald Trump even danced, after one of the weirdest, most disturbing “tributes” in memory. Luckily, Samantha Bee had a correspondent on-site to see how attendees were handling the tragedy.
Amy Hoggart, a British comic who’s been on Full Frontal since 2016, braved the Houston, Texas convention, there to make like Jordan Klepper and get regular folks to blurt out the unthinkable. And they sure did. Hoggart covered a lot of bases, including how they felt about the massacre, which occurred less than a five-hour drive away.
“I think everyone is extremely upset about the timing,” one younger man, who claimed he went to law school, told Hoggart. “It was incredibly, incredibly awkward. During an election week, and also right before the NRA, it’s horrible.” He also claimed the timing of the tragedy was incredibly convenient” for the left.
Speaking of timing, Hoggat asked a number of convention-goers about when was the right time to make an unthinkable atrocity “political.” An older man had an answer: “Two weeks, a month.”
The aforementioned former law school student would go even further. He said it was “too soon” to talk about the Parkland mass shooting, which happened in 2018. He wouldn’t even discuss Sandy Hook, from almost a decade ago.
One woman suggested Hoggart to that they were victims as well. “It’s devasting to see us get blamed, when we are not to blame,” she said about how some blamed not only guns but gun advocates, who bristle at any attempt to make assault weapons more difficult to obtain.
Solutions that don’t include limiting gun accessibility? They had a few. There was the old line about arming teachers, which is incredibly unpopular with already poorly-paid educators. One person agreed they should extended that to cleaning and lunch staff as well. One person said they could use other makeshift weapons as well, such as flashlights, even forks. (At least only one of them blamed doors.)
As for the beloved second amendment, the people Hoggart talked to remembered the first part, about the right to buy arms, but no one could recall the second, about a “well-regulated militia.”
One man implied that endless mass shootings are just broken eggs in the omelette that is the armed-to-the-teeth United States of America. “Freedom does come with a cost,” the man told Hoggart. When she asked him if the cost included “children’s lives,” he shrugged and said, “Just in general.”
You can watch Hoggart’s segment in the video above.