After reports broke yesterday about the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, during last night’s late night shows, the hosts all took a moment to address the horrific news. In the above clip, Las Vegas native Jimmy Kimmel made a lengthy and emotional call to action for common sense gun control laws. “They should be praying – they should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country,” Kimmel says about all the politicians who tweeted their “thoughts and prayers” for the victims but vote against gun control measures. “I want this to be a comedy show. I hate talking about stuff like this. I just want to laugh about things every night, but it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult lately. It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.”
Over on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah reacted to the way many conservatives say right after a mass shooting is “not the time” to talk about gun control. “If you say after a mass shooting is never the time, then you’ll never have the conversation in America, because there’s a mass shooting almost every single day. So when is the time?” Noah says. “We seem to do everything to avoid talking about guns. I’ve never been to a country where people are as afraid to speak about guns.”
Elsewhere, Conan O’Brien reflected not just on the Las Vegas shooting but the fact that responding to mass shootings have become alarmingly commonplace for him in recent years:
Now today, when I came into work, my head writer was standing in my office with a sheaf of papers. And he said, “Here are the remarks you made after the Sandy Hook shootings and the Pulse nightclub attacks in Orlando. You might want to look at them to see what you might want to say tonight.” And that – that struck me. How could there be a file of mass shooting remarks for a late night host? When did that become normal? When did this become a ritual? And what does it say about us that it has?
Watch some more clips from Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and James Corden below:
