Trevor Noah Has Some Terrible Ideas for Addressing School Shootings

Trevor Noah addressed the horrible aftermath of the Parkland shooting on The Daily Show on Tuesday. Specifically, he took a look at the terrible ideas right wingers float after every mass murder to avoid talking about guns. This wasn’t a natural angle for Noah to take, as he admits:

Look, my first instinct—I’m gonna be honest—my first instinct is to talk about limiting guns. But I’m an idiot, I get it. In my dumb mind, I keep thinking that gun violence is somehow related to guns. I haven’t quite figured it out yet. 

But after viewing clips of Fox News pundits making completely ridiculous suggestions for addressing the problem—Jeanine Pirro wants schools to be fortresses, Gingrich wants to arm the teachers, Jesse Watters wants to train kids in hand-to-hand combat—Noah gets into the spirit of Fox’s post-mass-shooting spirit.* “It might be kind of fun to live in their world, you know, when you think about it. Like, it’s a world free of embarrassment.” His ideas for ending school shootings—magnets are involved—are not practical, possible, or effective, but they’re better than anything Fox has come up with.

The point of the entire segment is to contrast Fox’s ludicrous hand-waving with the demands for gun control coming from the survivors of the shooting. Noah shows clips of teenagers organizing and demanding action, with a clarity and intelligence that is nowhere to be seen in the right wing clownshow on Fox. What he doesn’t do is address the disgusting right-wing attacks on teenagers who were being shot at less than a week ago—but it’s not a missed opportunity. Air a few clips of these newly minted gun control activists, as Noah does, and there’s really no need to bother responding to the likes of Dinesh D’Souza. Once you hear them talk, it’s clear that ignoring these students’ concerns because of their age is as ridiculous as, well, as ridiculous as training them in hand-to-hand combat and expecting them to best a madman with an AR-15.