Trevor Noah’s Powerful Message on Gun Control: Just ‘Try’

Trevor Noah dispensed with the script and spoke directly to his audience on Monday following the pair of mass shootings that claimed dozens of lives in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend.  

The Daily Show host began by using a controversial tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson to examine how some people have tried to downplay the severity of gun massacres by saying they are just one of many deadly problems in America. For Noah, it all comes down to “trying.” 

“All of these other things that people bring up still have a country that tries to stop them,” he said. “Trying is the thing. Medical errors happen, but they have tried to decrease medical errors by implementing new laws, new systems.” And to those who complain that more people die in car accidents than mass shootings, Noah pointed out that we ban unsafe cars, require driver’s licenses, and put in speed bumps. “We try!” he said.

“People run to the extremes,” Noah added. “They’ll be like, ‘Oh, after 9/11, 3,000 people died, America didn’t ban airplanes!’ Yeah, but they locked that shit up hard.” 

For Noah, he said America has always been about that “trying,” explaining, “It’s not about perfect, it’s about trying to be more perfect.” 

Which brought him back to guns. “You’re not saying get rid of guns, you’re saying try to minimize the chances of this happening,” he said. “Try to make it as hard as possible for people to own a gun, because you only want people who are willing to work hard to own a gun to own a gun. You only want people who respect a gun to own a gun.” 

Going back to the Second Amendment, Noah said the right to bear arms was “fundamentally about protecting human beings.” 

“What is the good of writing a law that now protects the guns as opposed to the human beings that it’s supposed to protect?” he asked. 

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Matt WilsteinSenior Editor

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