Daily Show guest host Jordan Klepper showed how the NRA’s culture of fear leads to gun violence and shootings.
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Clepper said:
The real purpose of an NRA convention isn’t to tell funny family stories about childhood abandonment. No, it’s to explain why all the gun violence in the last year has nothing to do with guns. In the past, they blamed video games, rap music, and for a brief period in the 90s, the Rachel. It could be anything. Well, not just anything. It can’t be guns, but anything else. And this year was no different.
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If you blame gun violence on weed, you don’t even try anymore. These people are just checking the names of things they don’t understand on the news. It’s grass! It’s ChatGPT! It’s Love Is Blind that crashes Netflix. Is it a thing? Is it a thing? Is it a thing?
And it’s not just the deviation of the NRA. They stoke those fears, fears of endemic crime, of trans people, of awakening, of mutant doobies. Everything comes looking for you. And you know what happens when you combine a culture of fear and guns?
You get the story just out of Kansas City, where a kid trying to pick up his siblings knocks on the wrong door and is shot and wounded by the landlord. This kid wasn’t put down by weed or social media. He was shot by a frightened person with a gun. And that’s the climate that the NRA maintains. They’re the irresponsible loudmouth lurking in the woods, making bear noises, scratching at trees to make you feel scared enough to go get yourself a gun (beep).
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The goal of every NRA rally is to find something else to blame for gun violence while scaring people so much they’ll go out and buy more guns.
The NRA is the most successful marketing scam in American history. The NRA is not an organization interested in freedom or the Second Amendment. The NRA is an extension of the gun manufacturing industry.
They only exist to sell more guns, and the only way to disempower them is to start treating them as arms dealers instead of a political constituency to appeal to.
Jason is the editor. He is also a member of the White House press pool and a congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason holds a bachelor’s degree in political science. His graduate studies focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association
