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Pop Culture

Trevor Noah nails the bizarre attitude toward stopping mass shootings in the US

Trevor Noah, mass shootings, gun violence
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah/Facebook

Trevor Noah has his finger on the pulse of American culture.

Trevor Noah's scripted comedy is great, but his off-the-cuff commentary during commercial breaks is often where he truly shines. The comedian has a way of sensibly framing hot topics and getting to the heart of important issues. For someone who didn't grow up in the U.S., he also seems to have his finger directly on the pulse of American culture and is able to accurately describe us to ourselves.

In a "Between the Scenes" segment, Noah expressed his bafflement at how America is the land of the possible when it comes to everything except stopping gun violence.

"One of the strangest things about conversations involving guns in America," he said, "is how quickly America goes from being the most hopeful and almost impossible-chasing nation to a nation that just believes nothing is possible all of a sudden."

Send a man to the moon? Let's do it. Go to Mars? Totally possible. Cure for cancer? Always working on it, and actually making some decent strides.

But mass shootings happening at an astronomical rate compared to other developed nations? Nope. Can't do anything about those.

He's right. It's a weird reaction for a people who are so "can do" about everything else. But as Noah points out, it's actually a small group of people who resist action on this issue and have convinced us that the situation is hopeless. Most Americans, including many gun owners, believe there should be more regulations on gun ownership.

Noah also pointed out that there's not one big solution that will solve all of our gun violence issues.

"What really frustrates me is how people try and make it a game of whack-a-mole when it comes to solving problems," he said. "You propose any type of solution and they go, 'Well that wouldn't have solved this one. This wouldn't have stopped that.' But that's not how solutions work. There is no problem that is going to be solved by one solution. A lot of the time big problems require a multitude of solutions, and what you do is you try to fix it incrementally, step by step."

He pointed out that people will pull the "slippery slope" argument and ask which guns to ban.

"Just start with the ones people seem to be using over and over again to go into schools to kill a bunch of children at one time," he said. (Then, if people start using other kinds of guns regularly for the same purpose, we can deal with those at that time.)

"It's a lot harder to commit these mass shootings when you don't have certain types of weapons," he said. "Nothing fixes everything, but you've got to start somewhere."

And, as he points out, we have to maintain hope that change is possible, just as agents of change have always done. So much good stuff here. Worth a watch:

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