With the Winter Olympics on NBC, Seth Meyers has been off for the past two weeks. That made Monday night his first chance to speak about the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
There was a lot to talk about, but there seemed to be one aspect of America’s renewed gun debate that has been bothering him the most.
As the surviving students continue to make progress in their campaign for change, Meyers said, “the NRA and their allies are resorting to increasingly ludicrous suggestions for how to deal with gun violence in schools.” He noted that President Donald Trump spent the weekend “repeating his deranged idea of giving guns to teachers.”
“This is one of the worst things about having Trump as president,” the Late Night host said. “Every time he goes on TV and blurts the dumbest things in the world, the rest of us have to debate it like it’s a real idea. He says, ‘Hey, I think we should take incredibly stressed-out people who make $30,000 a year and give them guns’ and then Wolf Blitzer has to stand there and go, ‘Shit, well let’s ask the panel.’”
The president has said he doesn’t want to arm all teachers but rather just the ones who already have firearms training. Though, as Meyers pointed out, there is no evidence that any significant percentage of teachers have the training, nor the desire, to carry weapons in the classroom—let alone the question of whether it would even help stop school shootings.
“Teachers need supplies, not guns,” Meyers said. “The only guns that should be in schools are glue guns. And they should be used the way all students use them: to glue the shop teacher’s butt to his chair.”