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Oct. 4, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:21
The Jimmy Kimmel Gun Grab | Ep. 394
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The left won't say gun confiscation, but that is what they're talking about.
We're going to talk about what that means, what good gun policy looks like, and of course, Jimmy Kimmel gives another emotional monologue, and we'll break it down for you.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so we have a lot to get to today here on the program.
I'm going to go through Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night that is sailing around the internet and making all sorts of fuss in the halls of media.
The Washington Post said that it was just incredibly brave.
The New York Times said that it was ground-shaking.
We're going to talk about what exactly he said, what he's wrong about, and I'm going to give you a lot of gun stats.
I'm gonna give you a lot of information on gun violence, violence using guns, what the stats actually say, what it means in comparable countries.
I'm gonna show you some charts.
By the time today's show is over, you're gonna know a lot more than you did before about guns.
Before I do any of that, actually, I want to make an apology.
I made a boo-boo on the show.
I knew it as I was doing it, and it was really irritating, because I should have stopped then.
But yesterday, I said that a semi-automatic gun can fire bursts.
It can't, okay?
Like, a military rifle that has the capacity for semi-auto sometimes also has burst capacity, but civilian guns do not have the capacity at semi-auto to go burst, right?
Every single pull of the trigger means a single firing of the bullet.
That means that you're not allowed to fire bursts from, like, a normal AR-15, a burst of three.
So I got that wrong yesterday.
I want to correct myself when I'm wrong.
I like to correct myself.
Okay.
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Okay, so, I want to start with a question.
Why is it the media, whenever they call for gun control, they do it on the heels of a mass shooting?
It's really an interesting phenomenon, right?
I understand why the media cover mass shootings.
Of course, it's big news.
I mean, what happened in Las Vegas over the weekend was enormous, frightening, horrifying news that makes you want to stay in your house forever and never come out again and just sit around thinking about the nature of human evil because it was that egregious.
But...
The media never talk about gun control outside the context of a mass shooting.
Now, some of that is just opportunism.
Some of that is, well, we think that this is a good time to talk about it because everybody's talking about guns right now.
But weekend after weekend, you'll have mass numbers of people being shot in Chicago and no talk about national gun control.
So why is it that they always do it with regard to mass shootings?
Especially because mass shootings represent a tiny, tiny, minute percentage of the number of shootings every year in the United States.
According to Mother Jones, right, you're seeing this stat that's floating around right now that's saying things like, 355 mass shootings this year.
Absolute crap.
Absolute crap.
The way that they're measuring that is if there's any incident where more than one person was shot, they're considering that a mass shooting.
The way that Mother Jones measures it, and Mother Jones is a lefty magazine, but they're intellectually honest about this, The way they measure it is they measure any shooting that has four or more people who are killed, and also is not a gang shooting, and also is not domestic violence, and it's not robbery.
So that's how you or I would tend to think of a mass shooting.
This is why when you see these stats about hundreds of mass shootings, you're thinking, no, that's not right.
Because what you're thinking about what the media are saying are two different things.
With that said, the number of mass shootings every year in the United States is actually quite low.
So, in 2015, Mark Fulman of Mother Jones, he came up with four.
Four.
Not 355.
Four.
In reality, in the year 2015, there were 46 deaths in mass shootings in 2015.
How many federal homicides were there involving guns?
Almost 13,000.
So the number of mass shooting deaths in 2015 were 0.3% of all gun-related homicides in the United States.
The same sort of percentage holds true today.
So, why is it that we pay so much attention to talking gun control in the aftermath of a mass shooting as opposed to, say, the normal murder rate?
Well, there are a few reasons.
One is the normal murder rate has been going down steadily for the last 20 years.
So it's hard to make a case that we need gun control when the murder rate has been going like this.
Murder rate per 100,000 is down.
It is not up, in fact.
The murder rate has been dropping steadily for years and years and years.
And the statistics that you are seeing from places like Vox.com, they're ignoring this stat.
Vox.com did put this stat up, but they buried it in one of their stories.
Look at this chart, okay?
The chart that I'm about to show you is the rate of firearm homicide deaths in the United States in 1981 to 2010.
You see how it's declined?
You see how it completely dropped off?
Alright, so it's very hard to make a case that we need stronger gun control.
When the crime rate has been dropping off and the rate of firearm homicide death has been dropping off as well.
Also, when you see a lot of statistics about the rise in firearm deaths, they are conflating two types of death.
They are conflating suicide and homicide.
So the number of firearm homicides in the United States has basically been stagnant for 15 years.
The number of suicides, however, has risen.
So here's the chart showing you that.
The top line here is the number of firearm suicides.
The bottom line is the number of firearm homicides.
So when everybody talks about the number of people being killed with guns, a lot of those people are killing themselves.
Right?
A lot of those people are murdering themselves.
So to suggest that this is solely about the number of murders is just not correct.
It's just not accurate.
I want to show you one more chart, this one also from Vox.com.
So, this is the rate of firearm suicide after Australia's gun buyback program.
So, they use this as proof that getting rid of firearms can minimize suicide.
So, what they say is the buyback program begins in 1996, and you see that the suicide rates drop all the way to 2006.
But I want you to see what they did here.
Look at the period before this.
Look at the period 1990 to 1996, or more accurately, 1987 to 1996.
All you see from 1996 to 2006 is basically a continuing decline in trajectory.
So this idea that the suicide rate in Australia was solely due to gun confiscation is just not true.
Again, everybody is trying to create these correlations and then suggest that taking guns away is causative, but it isn't.
And if we're going to talk about suicide rates by country, we have to talk about where suicide rates are the highest.
Not in the United States, in Japan.
Okay, so here is a chart showing you which countries have really high suicide rates.
So if you look at this chart, what you'll see is that the United States is way down there at the bottom at 10.1 suicides per 100,000 people.
Here are countries that have higher suicide rates.
You ready?
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland.
Japan.
Right, the highest one, I guess, is still hungry at 21.
Japan has about 20.
There are no guns in Japan.
None.
Okay, there were like six firearm-related deaths in Japan last year, but their suicide rate is nearly double what our suicide rate is.
So the idea that getting rid of the guns definitely gets rid of the suicide is just not true.
Again, no correlation there.
Now, I'm not saying that more guns means less crime.
I'm not saying that fewer guns means more crime.
What I'm saying is that there is no clear correlation.
There is no clear correlation.
So, I'm going to show you a couple more stats because I think that people need to understand this.
So, here's some stats, courtesy of the Washington Examiner.
So, here is the first stat.
This stat comes from Mother Jones.
Okay, so this stat shows you, this chart shows you, the gun ownership versus gun deaths by state.
So you see how there's a line, right?
And this looks like a pretty smooth correlation, right?
It looks like gun ownership versus gun deaths by state.
The states with more guns have more gun deaths.
Right?
Makes sense.
We're there.
Only one problem.
Notice the language here.
Gun deaths by state.
Remember what I just said.
There is a correlation in the United States between gun increase and suicide increase, but there is no correlation between gun increase and murder increase.
So what you're seeing here is a reflection of the suicide increase.
How do I know that?
Because I'm going to show you right now what it looks like when you look at the firearms murder rate.
Okay, not the, not the, not the suicide rate, the murder rate.
Okay, this is a scatterplot of the states in the United States, their gun ownership rate versus their firearms murder rate from 2014.
What you're seeing right now does not look like a straight line correlation.
It doesn't look like any sort of correlation.
It looks like a shotgun of data.
It looks like there are some states, presumably the one that's way up there on the top is probably D.C., but the idea here is that there are some states that have 60% gun ownership rate and very, very low rates of firearms murder, and there are some states with close to 0% gun ownership rate and low rates of firearms murder.
There are some states right here in the middle that look a little bit higher, but you know, Again, there is no correlation at all here, and to suggest that there is, is really incorrect.
And then finally, I will show you one more chart, and that is from, again, this one is from the FBI and census-related materials, firearms murders per 100,000 residents.
And here you see that the District of Columbia is far and away, far and away, the state that has the most firearm murder.
Notice that the states that have the most firearm murder also have big cities in them.
So except for New York, which has a pretty low firearms murder rate, Every area in the United States, 60% of all murder in the United States happens in, I believe, the top 50 metro areas.
Those tend to be Democrat areas.
Those tend to be urban areas.
Those are areas that are not what people think of when they think of murder rate with high gun ratios.
They think, when people think high murder rate, high guns, they think, you know, the boonies in Texas.
That's not where all the murder is happening.
The reason I'm pointing all this out is because you're hearing a lot of bad data today.
You're hearing a lot of bad data today.
From 1993 to 2013, the number of guns per person rose from .94 in the United States to 1.45.
Now, fewer people as a percentage of the population had guns, but that means that a lot of people like me are buying two guns.
Right?
Or they're like you, and they're buying five guns.
But, the number of firearms per person has risen, and the gun homicides have completely fallen off.
The gun homicides have fallen dramatically.
So, it's important to have all of this information in your head as background before we start going through all of the various propaganda that's being put out by the left on this.
Before I go through more of the propaganda and we get to Jimmy Kimmel and we break down what he said about gun violence, which I think is really not just politically egregious, I actually think it's morally egregious, and I'll talk about it in a second.
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So, okay.
So, we were talking about why is it that the media focus in on mass shootings when mass shootings are such a minority of shootings.
So, the first reason is because they believe that they can use the emotional baggage from mass shootings in order to promote a particular agenda.
The second reason is because the type of gun in mass shootings differs wildly from the type of gun that's used in most homicides.
So, in most homicides, what's used is a handgun, right?
Not a rifle.
In mass shootings, it tends to be a rifle.
The left likes to target rifles because rifles look scarier and fewer people own them.
Many, many, many more people own handguns than own rifles in the United States.
And so, the left doesn't want to run right into the teeth of political unpopularity by suggesting that they can get rid of all the handguns.
Instead, they like to focus in on the scary ones, the assault rifles, right?
All that kind of stuff.
Well, you can't do that if you look at the overall murder rate.
The only way to do that is by looking at mass shootings, where disproportionately people use semi-automatic rifles, or in this particular case, what looks like a semi-automatic rifle using a particular type of stock that bounces against your shoulder and makes the gun operate sort of like an automatic.
Again, it's also worth noting that they like to cherry pick.
So the reason they pick mass shootings as the basis for their arguments is because the evidence for gun control is strongest on mass shootings.
The reason being the sample size is really, really small.
The number of mass shootings generally across the world is not particularly high.
So it's easy to look at something like Australia's gun confiscation and then say, well, before that they had a gun, a mass shooting once every five years, and now they've had none.
Okay, but the sample size is just too small.
Australia's gun ban was followed by elimination of mass shootings.
The UK has seen about three since 1980 after its gun ban, but it wasn't like they were seeing them every week before that.
Correlation rarely equals causation.
And finally, the reason the left likes to focus on mass shootings as opposed to most gun homicides is because that's a case where it's very easy for them to separate the weapon from the person wielding it.
Mass shootings are very often carried out by people who are mentally ill, who have serious problems.
If the left came to you and said, you need to give up your gun because gang members are shooting each other in the inner city, you'd say, well no, that's a reason for me to keep my gun, right?
Because I'm not a gang member, I want to defend myself.
If the left says, listen, People are mentally ill.
You don't know who's mentally ill.
And maybe somebody in your family will be mentally ill.
Give up your gun.
That's a stronger case for them.
The problem is the vast majority of murders in the United States are not by mentally ill people, obviously.
So they want to focus on situations where it is a mentally ill person who's carrying out the attack, and therefore, it is possible that they can shy it off on society at large with the availability of guns at large, as opposed to creating a moral status for the person who's actually using it.
So, before we get to Jimmy Kimmel, and I really do want to get to Jimmy Kimmel, I first want to show you a couple of things that people have been talking about and that probably should be outlawed.
They should be outlawed, I say, you know, if we're going to talk about legislation, there are a couple of changes to legislation that I would make.
One is, there's a law called 18 U.S.C.
922 G. That is a provision in federal law that prevents firearms, federally licensed firearms dealers, from selling to mentally ill people.
One of the things that needs to be done is task forces need to be set up in order to investigate the crossover between the number of mentally ill people, people who aren't registered as mentally ill, and people who've gotten guns.
In California, there's like 30,000 people in the state of California who are registered as mentally ill and still have guns in their house.
That's a problem, so...
That's a situation where we should look into it.
That is not a rip, by the way, on what President Trump did earlier this year when President Trump signed a law that suggested that if you are on Social Security and you're incapable of handling your own finances, then we shouldn't be able to take your gun away from you without due process.
The key word there is without due process.
That's the key phrase.
The left ignores that key phrase.
That's what the bill did.
Before, it was, if they even suspect, right?
If the Social Security Administration has you registered as somebody who is using an aid to help you with finances, they come and take away your gun.
The bill says, no, we actually have to adjudicate that you're incompetent before we can take away your gun.
That's what Trump is doing.
There are other ways to strengthen enforcement of that provision.
Okay, other things that could be done.
I don't think these will be tremendously effective, but I think that It's probably worthwhile doing.
So here is one of these things.
So there's something called a bump stock, okay?
This was found on one of the weapons that was used by the shooter in Las Vegas.
A bump stock is basically an addition that is added to a rifle.
You put it on the back of the rifle, and it's essentially a spring.
So every time you shoot a rifle, the rifle recoils, right?
Every time you take a shot, it recoils.
Well, what the bump stock does is it bounces, it absorbs that, and then pushes the gun back and forth, right?
It's bouncing the gun back and forth.
You keep your finger stationary, the trigger actually bounces back and forth on your finger.
So you're not pulling the trigger like this a bunch of times, which you can only shoot as fast as you can pull your finger.
Instead, your finger is stationary, and the bump stock is using the force of the gun to bounce the trigger against your finger.
That's what a bump stock is.
Here's what footage of a bump stock looks like.
This is what apparently the shooter in Vegas was using.
So as you can see, the front of the gun is moving, right?
The front of the gun is actually bouncing against the back of the gun, on his shoulder, and you can see this guy has his finger through the trigger guard, and he's just holding his finger there, and then the gun bounces against his finger.
So it fires like a fully automatic weapon.
If we have outlawed fully automatic weapons in the United States, it makes no sense to have addendums to guns, additions to guns that can make them fully automatic.
So it makes sense to outlaw this.
The problem is they are very easy to manufacture.
As I explain it, very, very simple device, right?
It's basically a spring you put on the back of the gun that is stationary and that goes into your shoulder.
That's it.
It's very easy to make it on like a 3D printer or something.
So I'm not sure it'd be super effective, but if we're talking about legislation to outlaw things, that seems like not a terrible place to start.
Here's another thing that I believe they've already outlawed.
It's called the Autoglove.
So the Autoglove is apparently a glove that you wear on your hand and it's used I guess in some military situations and it is attached to a battery pack and basically is a button that goes on your finger and helps pull the trigger.
Again, you'll see it.
Here's what it looks like.
Introducing the Autoglove, a revolutionary new product designed to create even more fun and excitement on the range.
Designed by military veterans who served to protect the freedom we enjoy today.
The Auto Glove creates an experience like no other.
Now you can experience simulated automatic crates of fire with all your semi-automatic pistols, rifles, and shotguns.
You can see it's actually almost like a fake finger that's attached to your finger and goes through the trigger and then pulls back on it.
So it essentially fires it like an automatic.
That, I believe, was outlawed by ATF last year.
If not, then I believe it was already in the works, that being done.
Now, will any of this stop mass shootings?
No, it's not going to stop mass shootings.
Three out of the last four mass shootings have been perpetrated with semi-automatic weapons.
But if we're already banning automatic weapons, which everyone seems to agree with, including the NRA, then these particular addendums may not do much, but it seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense to have addendums to guns that can simulate the function of a machine gun.
Okay.
With all that as background, I now want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel and what Jimmy Kimmel said last night.
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Okay, so.
Now, finally, at long last, Jimmy Kimmel.
So Jimmy Kimmel did something last night that I find truly abhorrent.
Jimmy Kimmel spent an enormous amount of time last night talking about gun control.
It's his prerogative.
He can do that.
But again, he makes it about the emotional appeal and not about the facts.
So I just spent the first 20 minutes of this show explaining to you some facts and statistics on gun control, what it does, what it doesn't do, about what you're seeing when you look at these statistics, what mass shooting statistics actually look like.
That's not what people on the left do.
They do what Piers Morgan does, which is they say, look at all the horror.
Just look at the horror out there.
We've got to do something.
We've got to do it.
And if you don't believe me, you don't care.
You just don't care about those dead children at Sandy Hook, right?
This is the routine that they all like to play.
And it's not just Kimmel.
So we'll start with the buildup, right?
So Kimmel has sort of become the social justice king of late night television.
And there are a bunch of competitors.
They're all trying to compete with each other to out left themselves, to demonstrate how culturally relevant they are.
Trevor Noah leads the way, the least funny man in America, saying that, you know, the problem in America is that we just don't talk about guns.
Which leads me to ask a question.
Is he deaf or insane?
We don't talk about guns in America.
It's all we talk about after every shooting.
Here's Trevor Noah.
What's been particularly heartbreaking, is other than the lives lost, is how I feel like people are becoming more accustomed to this type of news.
Every single time.
I almost know how it's going to play out.
We're shocked, we're sad, thoughts and prayers, and then almost on cue, people are gonna come out saying, whatever you do, when speaking about the shootings, don't talk about guns.
We seem to do everything to avoid talking about guns.
I've never been to a country where people are as afraid to... Okay, I just have a question.
What the hell is he talking about?
He's never been to a country where people are as afraid to talk about guns?
Is he out of his mind?
Is he crazy?
I mean, Democrats have been talking incessantly about guns for years.
Barack Obama gave dozens of speeches about guns.
Barack Obama went to Arizona after the Gabby Giffords shooting and did a speech about guns.
He gave a speech where he cried about guns, right?
We've been talking about guns for years.
But Stephen Colbert does the same thing, right?
He says, well, you know, the real problem here is that people just don't have common sense about guns.
In order for you to have common sense about a subject, let me just say something about common sense.
In order for you to have common sense about a subject, first you have to know what the hell you're talking about.
Hey, common sense doesn't just come along in the wind.
If you don't know how a gun operates, then you don't get to talk about common sense gun solutions.
If you don't know what gun control looks like, if you don't know what kind of stuff you're proposing, if you're like Hillary Clinton, you've never seen a silencer or a suppressor, and you're saying things like, well, a suppressor means that the gun goes silent, you don't know what you're even talking about.
That's not common sense, that's just you being dumb because you don't know what you're saying.
But here is Colbert talking about common sense gun control, presumably as his studio is guarded by a bunch of very heavily armed men.
And now, President Trump, you've said you wanted to be a transformative president who doesn't care about the way things have always been done in Washington, D.C.
This is your chance to prove it.
And I mean this sincerely.
You do not owe the Republicans anything.
You know the Republicans tried to stop you from being president.
Well, screw them.
You want to make America great again?
Do something the last two presidents haven't been able to do.
Pass any kind of common sense gun control legislation that the vast majority of Americans want.
Right.
Do something.
But all the things he says to do have either been tried and failed or they have been counterproductive.
Right?
All the stuff that the left likes to talk about.
These things like universal background checks.
In California, we have universal background checks.
When you buy a gun from a federally licensed firearm dealer, you have to actually go and get a background check.
This is under federal law.
Universal background checks already exist.
The only thing that they're talking about when they say universal background checks are with regard to hand-to-hand transfers.
So, I sell you a gun and I'm a private gun owner.
But there's no real way to regulate that because if you're giving me cash and I'm giving you the gun, how do you even prosecute that?
Unless the gun is then used in a murder, there's no way for the police to even know about it.
So that doesn't even make any sense.
Gun dealers are heavily regulated because they're receiving lots of guns and the government can track it.
But if I sell you a gun, there's no way for anybody to know unless you go rob a bank with it.
So it's a post-facto thing.
With all that said, Jimmy Kimmel finally goes off last night, and Jimmy Kimmel again has become sort of the all-heart representative of all leftist causes.
So a couple of weeks ago we broke down in detail his lecture on health care reform, which was similarly based not on facts but on emotions.
Last night he did a long shtick about gun control that was entirely based on emotion and it was really nasty.
It was really nasty.
I don't mean it was nasty because he doesn't care.
He cares.
It's really nasty because he's suggesting that you and I don't care.
It doesn't matter that you lost sleep last night and I lost sleep last night because of what happened.
It doesn't matter that we're all heartbroken over what happened.
We don't agree with Jimmy Kimmel's evidence-less suggestions about gun control.
That means that we don't care.
We're bad people.
You want to know why the country is not unified?
It's because of stuff like this.
It's not because we disagree on policy.
We've been disagreeing about policy forever.
It's because there are certain people in the American public discourse who feel it necessary to impute bad motives to people who disagree.
And that's what Kimmel's doing here.
So here's Jimmy Kimmel.
We're going to go through his entire lecture.
So here he starts off ripping into Americans who disagree.
Well, hello everyone.
Here we are again in the aftermath of another Terrible, inexplicable, shocking and painful tragedy, this time in Las Vegas, which happens to be my hometown and Cleto's hometown, Cleto Sr.' 's hometown.
And as you know, at least 59 people are dead.
Hundreds of people were wounded in what they say was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, coming about a year and a half after the previous.
deadliest mass shooting in modern American history in Orlando where 49 people lost their lives and of course we pray for the victims and for their families and friends and we wonder why even though there's probably no way to ever know why a human being would do something like this to other human beings who are at a concert having fun and listening to music Jason Aldean was on stage.
Luke Combs, who is here with us tonight, he played the show, too.
And obviously, no one could have ever expected that something terrible would happen, but it did.
A very sick person smuggled 17 guns into his hotel room and smashed out the windows, started firing indiscriminately from the 32nd floor into a crowd of 22,000 people across the street.
And as a result of that, this morning, we have children without parents and Fathers without sons, mothers without daughters.
We lost two police officers.
We lost a nurse from Tennessee.
Okay, so all of this is true, all of this is fine, right?
Everything that he's saying here is true, all of it.
We all feel the same thing, right?
We're all feeling this.
It's not a matter of him grasping the emotion and nobody else getting the emotion.
We're all feeling this.
Some of us show it more on the surface than others, but what he is saying is obviously true.
But what's gonna be nasty is when he swivels this, and then he uses it as a club to beat his political opponents on gun control, which happens momentarily here.
...from a local school here in Manhattan Beach and it's the kind of thing that it makes you want to throw up or give up.
It's too much to even process.
All these devastated families who now have to live with this pain forever because one person with a violent and insane voice in his head managed to stockpile a collection of high-powered rifles and use them to shoot people.
The guy was an accountant.
He had no criminal record.
His brother, who lives in Florida, seems totally shocked, genuinely dumbfounded.
He said he saw no sign of any of this.
Okay, let's pass it right there for a second.
He's giving all the facts.
What do these facts suggest?
He passed a government-mandated background check.
No history of mental illness.
His brother didn't know anything was wrong with him.
What exactly would stop something like this?
Right?
Short of full gun confiscation, which is really what the left wants, and we'll talk about the possibility of that in a second.
Short of that, which no one on the left will admit they want, but they actually do want.
You know, they protest every time you say this.
If you say the left wants full-scale gun confiscation, Hillary Clinton will tell you no, Joe Biden will tell you no.
But short of full-scale gun confiscation, what exactly would Jimmy Kimmel do in a situation like this?
He's gonna spell out a bunch of policies that have nothing to do with what actually happened in Vegas now.
Wasn't on any watch list.
Didn't seem to have been a religious or political extremist.
Came out of nowhere.
And because of that, because there weren't any of the usual signs, you know, I've been reading comments from people saying this is terrible, but there's nothing we can do about it.
But I disagree with that intensely, because of course there's something we can do about it.
There are a lot of things we can do about it.
But we don't, which is interesting because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls, we take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there's nothing we can do about that.
Okay, so pause it right there.
So Charles Cook over at National Review makes a fantastic point about this, which is Kimmel's now undercutting his own case, right?
Because Kimmel opposes all those things.
He opposes travel bans, he opposes walls, he opposes phone tapping.
I don't assume that he doesn't care about terrorism.
I'm sure he does.
He just disagrees about the policy.
So why can't he grant us the same sort of credibility?
We care about what happened in Vegas.
We just disagree on the policy.
Beyond that, the fact is that when you're talking about somebody who's a foreigner coming into the United States and murdering people, that person does not have the same rights that you or I do as American citizens.
So the sort of measures that we have available to us to stop them are different than the sort of measures available to us to stop American citizens who are using freedom in evil ways in order to harm other people.
Kimmel continues.
Second Amendment, I guess.
Our forefathers wanted us to have AK-47s is the argument, I assume.
Orlando, Newtown, Aurora, San Bernardino, every one of these shootings, the murderer used automatic or semi-automatic rifles, which are not weapons used for self-defense.
Their weapons are designed to kill...
Thank you.
Okay, not true.
Okay, so number one, the founders would have wanted us to have AR-15s because the fact is that back in the day, all the weapons that people had were military-grade weapons, right?
A musket was a military-grade weapon.
Now, AR-15s aren't even military-grade.
Yesterday, as I said, I made the mistake about Comparing basically an M16, which has burst fire capacity, with a civilian AR, right?
That's not correct.
I was wrong about that.
Civilian guns are very different from military-issue guns.
For him to say that the Second Amendment doesn't cover things like AR-15s, a semi-automatic rifle, is akin to me saying that the First Amendment doesn't cover TV because the founders had never seen a TV, wouldn't know what it looked like, and don't understand how it works.
It's just a silly argument.
As far as the idea that ARs are not used for home defense, again, asinine.
I have a bunch of friends who use ARs for home defense.
You can find stories.
A.W.R.
Hawkins over at Breitbart has a good roundup of people who have used ARs for self-defense.
It happens on a relatively frequent basis.
But, again, you wouldn't expect Jimmy Kimmel to know all of this because here is where the left's version of common sense means they have to be completely disconnected from the fact.
Large numbers of people in the shortest possible amount of time.
This guy reportedly had 10 of them in his room, apparently legally.
At least some of them were there legally.
Why is that allowed?
I don't know why our so-called leaders continue to allow this to happen.
Or maybe a better question, why do we continue to let them to allow it to happen?
Five people got shot in Lawrence, Kansas last night.
Three of them died.
It didn't even make a blip because this is just a regular part of our lives now.
And you know what'll happen.
We'll pray for Las Vegas.
Some of us will get motivated.
Some of us won't get motivated.
The bills will be written.
They'll be watered down.
They'll fail.
NRA will smother it all with money.
And over time, we'll get distracted.
We'll mow on to the next thing.
And then it will happen again.
Again, what he's saying here is also not true.
He says the NRA is going to smother it in money.
The NRA is not among the top dozen spenders in the American political system.
The NRA does not give a lot of money to politicians.
The NRA is a very powerful force because there are millions of people who are members.
Millions of people.
The reason the American people are not willing to elect representatives to repeal some of their Second Amendment rights is because we're not willing to do that.
Not because the NRA is bribing people.
It's amazing.
Democrats never make this argument about unions that give tons of cash to Democrats that unions are bribing people, but they make this argument about the NRA that is actively not bribing people.
Okay, I want to continue analyzing everything that Kimmel is saying here, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Quip.
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Okay.
So, back to Jimmy Kimmel.
So Kimmel continues along these lines.
And you just, again, all of this is ignorant.
None of it is based on knowledge about guns or firearms or any of this stuff.
But this is what passes for brilliance and common sense in Hollywood.
House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said this is not the time, or actually it was today, this morning, she said it was not the time for political debate.
And I don't know, we have 59 innocent people dead.
It wasn't their time either.
So I think now is the time for political debate.
President Trump is visiting Las Vegas on Wednesday.
He spoke this morning.
He said he's praying for those who lost their lives.
You know, in February he also signed a bill that made it easier for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally.
Okay, this is not true.
Stop it there.
Okay, so again, this is like number—lie number eight in this—in this little monologue.
So, number one, again, this idea that people don't care and that's why they don't want to talk policy.
Maybe policy is best talked not when you are passionate about the issue, but when you're removed a little bit so that you're not making the sorts of bad arguments Jimmy Kimmel is making right here.
So, the bill, again, that Trump signed back in February did not—it was backed by the ACLU—it did not, in fact, Make it easier for mentally ill people to purchase guns.
It said that a judge had to rule you mentally incompetent before you could have your gun taken away or your ability to buy a gun taken away.
Right, that's what it says.
The due process is still a thing.
Okay, you don't just get to take somebody's gun away because you're afraid that they may be mentally ill.
You actually have to show they're mentally ill before you take their gun away.
People who are, you know, people in the United States still have rights until due process goes through.
Okay, time for a few more falsehoods from Jimmy Kimmel.
The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won't do anything about this because the NRA has their balls in a money clip, also sent their thoughts and their- Okay, again, pause it.
The idea that the NRA has anybody's balls in a money clip is just not true.
It is just not true.
Their constituents don't want them to do the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about because the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about is not correct.
The NRA is not bribing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Again, this is just him attributing bad motives to these politicians.
They don't really believe what they believe, you see.
They just don't care enough, and they'd rather be paid blood money for dead people in Las Vegas.
Just absurd.
And now he's getting to the point of insulting, right?
Because now they're all just weaklings who, if they had a shred of heart, they would do exactly what Jimmy Kimmel wants.
Okay, that is not true.
Pause it again.
This is the so-called gun show loophole.
It is not correct.
praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country because it is so crazy.
Right now, there are loopholes in the law that let people avoid background checks if they buy a gun privately from another party, if they buy a gun online or at a gun show.
So I want to show you something.
Okay, that's not true.
Pause it again.
This is the so-called gun show loophole.
It is not correct, okay?
The gun show loophole, it doesn't exist.
As I said before, if you buy a gun at a gun show from a federally licensed firearms dealer, They must do a background check.
If you buy a gun on the internet, it is shipped to a federally licensed firearms dealer.
You do a check.
They do a background check before you're allowed to take possession of the gun.
All of this is true.
The same law is on the books now that was on the books 50 years ago.
If I sell you a gun, there's no way to mandate that I do a background check, because again, I have like one gun and I'm selling it to you, or God forbid I die and I pass my guns on to my wife, Right?
This is hand-to-hand transfers.
Not the same thing.
Now, you can make the case, by the way, that we should force people to do background checks, I suppose.
I think it would be ineffective, but you can make the case.
But it has nothing to do with what happened in Vegas.
He admitted earlier here that all these guns were basically legally bought.
So, again, it doesn't make any sense.
It's just him saying that he feels more than you feel, and therefore he knows more than you know.
These are the senators who, days after the shooting in Orlando, voted against a bill that would have closed those loopholes.
These are the 56 senators who didn't want to do anything about that.
90% of Democrats, I'm not talking about politicians here, I'm talking about people, and 77% of Republicans support background checks at gun shows.
89% of Republicans and Democrats are in favor of restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill.
But not this gang.
They voted against both of those things.
So, with all due respect, your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient.
And, by the way, the House of Representatives will be voting on a piece of legislation... Okay, I have a question.
Who died and made Jimmy Kimmel God?
Who's Jimmy Kimmel to decide whether your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient?
So your thoughts and your prayers are only sufficient if you do what Jimmy Kimmel wants you to do?
That's the way this works now?
Who died and made him Jesus?
Like, really, how did this work exactly?
That Jimmy Kimmel gets to be the great moral arbiter of our time, a late-night talk show host who used to host The Man Show with women bouncing on trampolines.
He's now the great arbiter of what constitutes morality in politics, and if you disagree with him, your thoughts and prayers are insufficient.
Doesn't matter that you were fervently praying for the victims.
Doesn't matter that you were donating your time or your blood.
None of that matters.
If you disagree with Jimmy Kimmel, what you've done today is insufficient.
You must pay.
You will burn in the fiery bowels of Jimmy Kimmel's hell.
Just gross.
This is just gross stuff.
Okay, again, I'm not doubting Jimmy Kimmel's sincerity.
I believe he is completely sincere.
I am doubting whether it is moral to doubt other people's sincerity based on their political viewpoint.
He continues.
Wait.
It's a bill to legalize the sale of silencers for guns.
This is what they're working on.
We have a major problem with gun violence in this country, and I guess they don't care.
And if I'm wrong on that, fine, do something about it, because I'm sick of it.
And, you know, I want this to be a comedy.
Well, he's sick of it, so I guess we're done here, gang.
He's sick of it, so I guess we're done here, gang.
I mean, as long as he's sick of it, I guess that those rights just go out the window.
Again, he's bringing up silencers and suppressors.
Stupid.
Okay, there is no silencer or suppressor used in this crime, and if you use a suppressor, which is what people who don't know what they're talking about call a silencer, I mean, the opposite.
If you use a silencer, which is what a suppressor is, all it does is it reduces the sound from basically a gunshot to a jackhammer, so it's still incredibly loud.
Again, none of this has to do with anything that just happened in Vegas, but Jimmy Kimmel's on a roll now.
You know, Bluto's going.
Don't let's stop him now.
Just let him roll.
Again, he's sick of it.
He's sick of it.
And then he says, and then he talks about how he really wants to do comedy, but he can't because he just feels too much.
I hate talking about stuff like this.
I just want to, you know, laugh about things every night.
But that, it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult lately.
It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.
And what I'm talking about tonight isn't about gun control.
It's about common sense.
Common sense says no good will ever come from allowing a person to have weapons that can take down 527 Americans at a concert.
Okay, pause it right there.
I know some good that can come from those people having weapons.
How about the cops who broke down the door so this guy killed himself?
They all had these kinds of weapons.
All of them.
So clearly some people should have these weapons, it's just not you.
That's what Kimmel is saying.
And he goes on, and we don't have to do the rest of it, but basically, he suggests in the transcript, he says, the NRA fought to make sure that people on the no-fly list can buy guns.
Again, Teddy Kennedy was on the no-fly list.
The problem with no-fly, no-buy is that the no-fly list was too broad, and again, there is something called due process of law in the United States.
He says that no American citizen needs an M16 or 10 of them, okay?
Military-grade weaponry is largely illegal for private citizens to own in the United States.
We're talking about something with automatic capacity.
Machine guns have been banned in the United States since 1986.
Any machine gun made after 1986, it's illegal for you to own under federal law.
And then he says you should write your congressperson, and you should do something, and then he says he thinks it's important, and he finishes by saying, you know, I think it's important.
Okay, well, guess what?
We all think it's important.
We all think it's important.
But you are not an expert just because you feel deeply.
You feeling deeply does not make you an expert on a topic.
It does not give you the background expertise.
It does not give you the statistical expertise to talk about this stuff.
Even people who study this stuff make statistical mistakes.
I made one earlier today when I tweeted something out and corrected it.
The fact is, Jimmy Kimmel doesn't even bother with that kind of research.
And the media are cheering him.
Why?
Because all that matters is the feelings.
We can't have a healthy body politic like this.
We cannot.
We cannot have a healthy body politic when the suggestion is that people on the other side just don't give a crap about their fellow Americans being shot and murdered in cold blood.
They're just being paid off by the NRA.
That's a recipe for people out in the streets hitting each other with clubs.
That really is.
This is a disaster area.
Substituting emotion and emotional accusations for discourse that is reasoned and evidence-based is a huge mistake.
Jimmy Kimmel should not be cheered for what he did last night.
Jimmy Kimmel should be asked to provide the evidence for his suppositions rather than the evidence for his emotions.
Again, I believe he's sincere.
Sincerity does not make what you're saying smart.
Okay, so Democrats are pushing along these same lines, and they are all basically following Jimmy Kimmel's lead now.
So we'll have more of this tomorrow.
But first, you know, I want to do things I like and things I hate.
We'll do that.
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Okay, so a couple of things that I like here.
So, first thing that I like, and sometimes you just need a break from the news, obviously, and a book that I've been reading, enjoying at bedtime, there's a book called The Game, Inside the Secrets of Baseball's Power Brokers by John Pesce.
I believe he wrote for Sports Illustrated, and it traces basically how baseball was shaped from 1993 to 2010 by Bud Selig and the owners and the players union.
It's really fun to read, it's really comprehensive.
If you like baseball, you'll like the book.
Check it out, The Game by John Pesce.
Okay, other things that I like.
So in a time when we're tearing each other apart, in a time when we are suggesting that we don't care enough about each other, I want to show you this video.
This happened about one hour before the shooting in Las Vegas.
This is what the concert looked like an hour beforehand when everybody was singing God Bless America together again.
Again, this is one hour before the massacre in Vegas.
Sing on the earth of America.
Land in that hallow.
Stand beside me, hanging down.
It's just heartbreaking.
You know, that's America.
That's America.
It's people like me and Jimmy Kimmel.
We disagree on everything, but we get together and we sing God Bless America because we agree that we're brothers at the end of the day.
I may be ripping Jimmy Kimmel today because I don't like his implication that people like me don't care enough.
But I care what happens to Jimmy Kimmel.
I think Jimmy Kimmel cares what happens to me.
I think that we both care what happens to Americans when bad things happen.
And even if we disagree on the policy, we can still agree that we care for one another enough to live in a free country.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so yesterday, the ESPN reversed its decision not to show people standing or kneeling for the anthem.
They had said for about a year they weren't going to show the anthem.
Last night they reversed themselves because they felt like in the aftermath of the shooting they should show people standing for the anthem as a sign of unity.
One NFL player actually sat during the anthem anyway, after the shooting, which is just incredible.
The player, of course, was a cornerback named Marcus Peters.
And a linebacker named Ukeem Eligwe, I guess.
The only two players on either team who decided to sit during the anthem.
Here's some video.
Here's Marcus Peters sitting during the anthem.
Okay, it's at times like this when you see that and you realize, look, the national anthem still is a unifying force.
God bless America.
These symbols of unity matter, dammit.
They do matter.
Okay, I think that Marcus Peters probably wants American unity too, but he needs to understand that when he rips symbols of American unity, all he is doing is tearing us apart further.
We need these symbols.
We need them.
They are important.
Symbolism matters in every religion, in every political race, in every political, in every republic.
Symbols matter.
We have to hold something together or we're going to be separated and that's not going to be good.
Okay, one more thing that I hate.
There's an actor who tweeted something stupid yesterday.
He tweeted, there's this ridiculous notion from a lot of people now that they should be tweeting things their children say.
It annoys me.
So this actor, I guess his name is Boris Kojo.
He's on some TV show or another.
He says, my 10-year-old asked me how the shooter was able to get his machine gun.
I told him that pretty much anyone in the U.S. can.
But why, Daddy?
He asked.
Okay, so, so many things are wrong with this.
First of all, um, you know, whenever people say my kid asked me, usually their kid didn't ask them.
But beyond that, let's assume that's right.
Why are you lying to your kid?
Not anyone in the United States can get a machine gun.
Not anyone in the United States can get a machine gun.
That's absolute nonsense.
Again, it's been federally illegal to get a post-1986 machine gun in the United States since 1986.
It's just not the case.
Again, emotion overcoming rationality and overcoming evidence is the death of political discourse.
Okay.
So, it's been a dark day.
It's been a very dark week.
Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day, and we'll show you all sorts of fun things, including President Trump throwing paper towels at people, I guess, in Puerto Rico.
Like, that's a thing that actually happened.
We sort of ran out of time today, but I'll show it to you tomorrow.
In the meantime, keep safe out there and know that your neighbor loves you, even if you guys disagree on politics, okay?
We talk about it every day about the disagreements.
Let's talk a little bit about the love.
Your neighbor, you know, they may not like you, but they love you.
Because we're still all Americans.
I will see you tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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