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“The investigation into the tragedy in Las Vegas this week has sparked a larger debate in America between people who want commonsense gun control, and people who are wrong,” Colin Jost quipped at the start of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update last night, starting off an impassioned, angry, and biting segment on gun control.
It’s been a week since Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured hundreds as he fired on the Las Vegas strip. The NRA has, uncharacteristically, carefully announced its support for legislation limiting bump stocks—the devices that allowed Paddock’s semiautomatic weapons to fire many rounds continuously—though the move was accompanied by criticism that this was a ploy to avoid more sweeping regulations.
“This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. The guy had 47 guns,” Jost continued, making clear that this is a problem that reaches far beyond a small device like the bump stock. “No one should own 47 of anything. If you own 47 cats, you are not a ‘responsible’ pet owner, you are a crazy cat lady. And unlike with guns, the government will actually come and take your cats away because everyone agrees that’s insane.”
Cohost Michael Che brought the point home, remarking that no one should own anything more than one gun with six bullets. “If you can’t hit what you’re shooting with six bullets, than you don’t need to be shooting at it,” he said. “Learn karate or use your words!”
The truth is, most people do not need any guns at all, and the current interpretation of the Second Amendment as an individual’s right to bear arms has not always been the case, if only because the Founding Fathers did not believe that African Americans or white people who did not swear loyalty to the patriot cause were allowed to own guns.
Jost pointed out the Trump administration’s intentional deadlock on gun control using Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s move to end Obama-era workplace protections for transgender employees as example. “Clearly Trump and Sessions only care about reversing this policy because Obama created it,” he concluded. “What we need to do is convince these guys that Obama wrote the Second Amendment to protect guns; the next day, Trump will be tossing our guns in the ocean like paper towels.”