My take:
In general, the skit does a good job pointing out the mostly-emotion-based arguments going around after one of these incidents. It does a good job mixing some humor in a topic that is all-to-often serious from both sides. I think humor is needed when this is going on national TV.
- Rifles do make up a small portion of gun deaths. Especially AR-15-type rifles which make up a fraction of the fraction of rifle deaths.
- Where does one get a pepper rifle? Asking for a friend.
- With the amount of guns in this country, no one should expect any "common sense" solution to actually work.
- People forget how large and expansive this country is. Govt. mandatory buy-backs wouldn't result in much of a change.
- The NRA is a good punching bag, but not the boogie-man they are made out to be.
- When we look at stats (we saw how well that worked with Neil DeGrasse Tyson), mass shooting events are very, very rare. People being scared of that possibility and not scared of any other things that has a statistically-higher chance of hurting them, are doing so based solely on emotion. We should not craft legislation that infringes on our constitutional rights based on emotion.
I think this is because the media does focus so much attention on them. While it's obviously important they do cover it, the incessant coverage leads people to believe it's happening more than it does. The same way Trump can just spout the same lies over and over again and people believe it to be true.
Just look at the kid who open-carried (with body armor, and multiple mags) into Wal-Mart the other day (Missouri, maybe?). People freaked out, a firefighter held him at gun point, and the cops openly admitted that "he's lucky to be alive". It was completely legal for him to do what he did, but the fear of a statistically-low chance of a mass shooting led people to run out of the store, the manager to pull the fire alarm, someone to hold him at gun point, and the cops to be justified in shooting and possibly killing someone who was not breaking the law in the slightest.
- Suicide-by-gun is often forgotten about when mentioning the number of gun deaths per year.
- The "militia" angle. Despite what Adam said prior, the Heller decision reinforced an individual's right to keep and bear arms.
- Like drug laws, some gun laws were also shaped due to black people. That's history.
- Stand Your Ground laws, like most laws, are sometimes misapplied and mis-directed.
- The Philando Castile case should enrage anyone who is a gun owner and anyone who supports concealed carry. The NRA was notable silent in that case as mentioned.
- The "I'm black and systemic racism is killing us" angle is tired.
- It's true that if gun-rights activists, including the NRA, truly believe that everyone has the right to keep and bear arms, they should be asking why the NRA ignores cases like Philando Castile.
(The auto-numbering thing here messed me all up because apparently paragraphs are bad)
I think we (i.e. the govt.) needs to recognize the fact that guns aren't going away and putting more and more restrictions on what types of weapons are available will not have the desired affect (unless, of course, the intent is to simply have less and less people own them....sort of like Adam's section about how the NRA spent decades changing the political landscape). The government should go back to what it used to do. Provide education and training on gun use.
I'm not about to chastise this whole thing because I dislike a source or two. The fact is, he may have used some from the Brady Center, but also used some from the NRA, RAND Corporation, and news sources. If anyone thinks this was a smug attempt at pro-gun stances, I can't help you because that stance leads me to believe that anything outside of full-on "GUNS ARE THE BEST THING EVER" will always be anti-gun. That completely ignores the point of the skit. To come from both sides. I don't agree with everything, but it's laughable to say it was "Orwellian".
In the case of guns, it's such a long, complex, issue, that we can't reasonably expect a 24 minute show to cover everything. For example, it's very easy to say "Marissa Alexander is a perfect example of why SYG laws don't benefit black people" while forgetting to mention that a warning shot was NOT legal at the time and that she fired a warning shot with her kids nearby. they ignore the fact that FL law
required her to get 20 years, but she took a plea deal for time served (3 years) and her case helped change the law making warning shots permissible in some cases.
The expectation is not to have a show tell people what to think, but offer objective opinions and facts from both sides and hoping the general public has enough sense to deduce the information themselves and come up with their own viewpoint. At the least, give them the kick they need to perform their own research should they not come up with a concrete opinion from a 24 minute TV show. This whole black or white thing surrounding guns (and politics in general) is not conducive to level-headed decision making.
