On Tuesday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro absolutely tore apart Jimmy Kimmel’s emotion-laden monologue on Monday night in which a tearful Kimmel ripped the GOP for not enacting harsher gun control laws as well as those who responded to the Las Vegas massacre by praying rather than pressing for harsher gun control laws. Kimmel’s monologue got wide media play from the gun control-obsessed MSM; Shapiro simplly rolled the tape of Kimmel and paused intermittently to fiercely decimate Kimmel’s rant. In the end, Shapiro returned to one of his key perspectives; that judgments based on feelings rather than facts and reason are a recipe for disaster.
Shapiro began:
With all that said, Jimmy Kimmel finally goes off last night. Jimmy Kimmel has become sort of the all-heart representative of all leftist causes. A couple of weeks ago we broke down in detail his lecture on health care reform, which was similarly based not on facts, just based on emotions. Last night he did a long shtick about gun control that was entirely based on emotion, and it was just really nasty. It was really nasty. I don’t think it was nasty because he doesn’t care; he cares; it’s really nasty because he’s suggesting you and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter that you lost sleep last night and I lost sleep last night because of what happened. It doesn’t matter that we’re all heartbroken over what happened; we don’t agree with Jimmy Kimmel’s evidence-less suggestions about gun control; that means that we don’t care; we’re bad people. You want to know why the country’s not unified? It’s because of stuff like this.
It’s not because we disagree on policy; we’ve been disagreeing about policy forever. It’s because there are certain people in the American public discourse who feel it necessary to impute bad motives to people who disagree, and that’s what Kimmel’s doing here.
So here’s Jimmy Kimmel; we’re going to go through his entire lecture; here he starts off ripping into Americans who disagree.
Kimmel:
Well, hello, everyone; here we are again, in the aftermath of another terrible, inexplicable, shocking and painful tragedy. This time in Las Vegas, which happens to be my home town, and Cleto’s home town, and Cleto Sr’s home town, and as you know, at least 59 people are dead, hundreds of people are wounded in what they’re saying is the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history — coming about a year and a half after the previous deadliest mass shooting in modern American history in Orlando when 49 people lost ther lives. And of course we pray for the victims and for their families and friends and we wonder why, even though there’s probably no way to ever know why a human being would do something like this to other human beings who are at a concert, having fun and listening to music. Jason Aldean was on stage, Luke Combs who was here with us tonight; he played the show, too. And obviously no one could have ever expected that something terrible would happen, but it did.
A very sick person smuggled 17 guns into his hotel room and smashed out the windows, started firing indiscriminately from the 32nd floor into a crowd of 22,000 people across the street. And as a result of that, this morning, we have children without parents and fathers without sons, mothers without daughters. We lost two police officers. We lost a nurse from Tennessee.
Shapiro:
Well, all of this is fine, right. Everything that he’s saying here is true, all of it; we all feel the same thing; we’re all feeling this. It’s not a matter of him grasping the emotion and nobody else getting the emotion; we’re all feeling this. Some of us show it more on the surface than others, but what he is saying is obviously true.
But what’s going to be nasty is when he swivels this and then he uses it as a club to beat his political opponents on gun control, which happens momentarily here.
Kimmel:
A special ed teacher from a school here in Manhattan Beach.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to throw up or give up, it’s too much to even process. All these devastated families who now have to live with this pain forever because one person with a violent and insane voice in his head managed to stockpile a collection of high-powered rifles and use them to shoot people. The guy was an accountant; he has no criminal record. His brother who lives in Florida seems totally shocked, genuinely dumbfounded, he said he saw no sign of any of this. The owner of the store that sold the killer some of the rifles said he passed the government-mandated background check when he was in the store.
Shapiro:
Okay, let’s stop it right there for a second. He’s giving all the facts. What do these facts suggest? He passed a government-mandated background check; no history of mental illness, his brother didn’t know anything was wrong with him. What exactly would stop something like this? Short of full gun confiscation, which is really what the Left wants, and we’ll talk about the possibility of that in a second, short of that, which no one on the Left will admit they want but they actually do want, they protest every time you say this, if you say the Left wants full gun confiscation, Hillary Clinton will tell you no, Joe Biden will tell you no; but short of full gun confiscation, what exactly would Jimmy Kimmel do in a situation like this? He’s going to spell out a bunch of policies that have nothing to do with what actually happened in Vegas now.
Kimmel:
He wasn’t on any watch list. He didn’t seem to have been a religious or political extremist. Came out of nowhere. Because of that, because there weren’t any of the usual signs, I’ve been reading comments from people who say, “This is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” But I disagree with that intensely. Because of course there’s something we can do about it, there’s a lot of things we can do about it. But we don’t, which is interesting. Because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones; we invoke travel bans; we build walls; we take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there’s nothing we can do about that.
Shapiro:
Okay, pause it right there. So Charles Cooke over at National Review makes a fantastic point about this, which is: Kimmel’s now undercutting his own case, right? Because Kimmel opposes all those things; he opposes travel bans; he opposes walls; he opposes phone tapping. I don’t assume that he doesn’t care about terrorism; I’m sure he does. He just disagrees about the policy. So why can’t he grant us the same sort of credibility? We care about what happened in Vegas, we just disagree on the policy. Beyond that, the fact is that when you’re talking about somebody who’s a foreigner coming into the United States and murdering people, that person does not have the same rights that you or I do as American citizens, so the sort of measures that we have available to us to stop them are different from the sort of measures available to us to stop American citizens who are using freedom in evil ways in order to harm other people. Kimmel continues:
Kimmel:
The Second Amendment, I guess, our forefathers wanted us to have AK-47s is the argument, I assume. Orlando, Newtown, Aurora, San Bernardino, every one of these shootings the murderer used automatic or semiautomatic rifles, which are not weapons you use for self-defense. They’re weapons designed to kill —
Shapiro:
Okay. Pause it. Not true. Number one, the founders would have wanted us to have AR-15s because the fact is that back in the day, all the weapons people had were military-grade weapons. A musket was a military grade weapon. Now, AR-15s aren’t even military-grade. Yesterday, as I said, I made the mistake about comparing basically an M-16, which has burst-fire capacity, with a civilian AR, that’s not correct. I was wrong about that; civilian guns are very different from military-issue guns; for him to say that the Second Amendment doesn’t cover things like AR-15s, a semi-automatic rifle, is akin to me saying that the First Amendment doesn’t cover TV, because the founders had never seen a TV, wouldn’t know what it looked like, and don’t understand how it works.
It’s just a silly argument. As far as the idea that ARs are not used for self-defense, again, asinine. I have a bunch of friends who use ARs for home defense, you can find stories, A W.R. Hawkins, over at Breitbart, has a good round-up of people who have used ARs for self-defense; it happens on a relatively frequent basis.
But again, you wouldn’t expect Jimmy Kimmel to know all of this because here is where the Left’s version of common sense means they have to be completely disconnected from the facts.
Kimmel:
— large numbers of people in the shortest possible amount of time. And this guy, reportedly he had 10 of them in his room, apparently legally. At least some of them were there legally. Why is that allowed? I don’t know why our so-called leaders continue to allow this to happen. Or, maybe, better question, why do we continue to let them allow it to happen?
Five people got shot in Lawrence, Kansas, last night, three of them died, it didn’t even make a blip because this is just a regular part of our lives now. And you know what will happen; we’ll pray for Las Vegas. Some of us will get motivated; some of us won’t get motivated. The bills will be written; they’ll be watered down; they’ll fail. The NRA will smother it all with money and over time we’ll get distracted, we’ll move on to the next thing. And then it will happen again. And again.
Shapiro:
Stop it there for a second. Again, what he’s saying here is also not true, when he says that the NRA is going to “smother it in money.” The NRA is not among the top dozen spenders in the American political system. The NRA does not give a lot of money to politicians. The NRA is a very powerful force because there are millions of people who are members. Millions of people. The reason the American people are not willing to elect representatives to repeal some of their Second Amendment rights is because we’re not willing to do that, not because the NRA is bribing people. It’s amazing: Democrats never make this argument about unions that give tons of cash to Democrats, that unions are bribing people, but they make this argument about the NRA that is not actively bribing people.
Kimmel continues along these lines. Again, all of this is ignorant; none of it is based on knowledge about guns, or firearms, or any of this stuff. This is what passes for brilliance and common sense in Hollywood.
Kimmel:
Last night, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said this is not the time — actually it was today, this morning, she said it was not the time for political debate. I don’t know, we have 59 innocent people dead, it wasn’t their time either. So I think now is the time for political debate.
President Trump is visiting Las Vegas on Wednesday; he spoke this morning; he said he’s praying for those who lost their lives. In February, he also signed a bill that made it easier for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally.
Shapiro:
Okay, this is not true. Stop it there. Okay, again, this is like lie number eight in this little monologue. Number one, again, this idea that people don’t care and that’s why they don’t want to talk policy? Maybe policy is best talked not when you’re passionate about the issue, but when you’re removed a little bit, so that you’re not making the sorts of bad arguments Jimmy Kimmel is making right here.
So, the bill, again, that Trump signed back in February, did not — it was backed by the ACLU, it did not, in fact, make it easier for mentally ill people to purchase guns. It said that a judge had to rule you mentally incompetent before you could have your gun taken away or your ability to buy a gun taken away. That’s what it says. Due process is still a thing; you don’t just get to take somebody’s gun away because you’re afraid that they may be mentally ill; you actually have to show they’re mentally ill before you take their gun away. People in the United States still have rights until due process goes through. Okay. Time for a few more falsehoods from Jimmy Kimmel.
Kimmel:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the NRA has their balls in a money clip, also sent their thoughts —
Shapiro:
Okay, pause it. The idea that the NRA has anybody’s balls in a money clip is just not true. It is just not true. Their constituents don’t want them to do the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about because the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about is not correct. The NRA is not bribing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Again, this is just him attributing bad motives to these politicians. They don’t really believe what they believe, you see; they just don’t care enough and they’d rather be paid blood money for dead people in Las Vegas. Just absurd. And now he’s getting to the point of insulting, right? Now they’re all just weaklings, who, if they had a shred of heart, they would do exactly what Jimmy Kimmel wants.
Kimmel:
— and their prayers today, which is good. They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country, because it’s so crazy. Right now, there are loopholes in the law that let people avoid background checks if they buy a gun privately from another party, if they buy a gun online or at a gun show.
Shapiro:
Not true. Pause it again. This is the so-called “gun show loophole.” It is not correct. The “gun show loophole,” it doesn’t exist. As I said before, if you buy a gun at a gun show from a federally-licensed gun dealer, they must do a background check. If you buy a gun on the internet, it is shipped to a federally-licensed firearms dealer; you do a check; they do a background check before you are allowed to take possession of the gun. All of this is true: the same law is on the books now was on the books 50 years ago. If I sell you a gun, there’s no way to mandate that I do a background check, because again, I have like one gun and I’m selling it to you, or God forbid, I die, and I pass my guns on to my wife, right, this is hand-to-hand transfers, not the same thing. Now, you can make the case, by the way, that we should force people to do background checks, I suppose, I think it would be ineffective, but you can make the case. But it has nothing to do with what happened in Vegas. He admitted earlier here that all these guns were legally bought. So again, it doesn’t make any sense; it’s just him saying that he feels more than you feel and therefore he knows more than you know.
Kimmel:
So I want to show you something. These are the faces of the senators who, days after the shooting in Orlando, voted against a bill that would have closed those loopholes. These are the 56 senators who didn’t want to do anything about that.
90% of Democrats — I’m not talking about politicians here, I’m talking about people — and 77% of Republicans support background checks at gun shows. 89% of Republicans and Democrats are in favor of restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill. But not this gang! They voted against both of those things. So with all due respect, your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient.
By the way, the House of Representatives will be voting on a piece of legislation this week.
Shapiro:
Okay, I have a question. Who died and made Jimmy Kimmel God? Who’s Jimmy Kimmel to decide whether thoughts, your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient? So your thoughts and your prayers are only sufficient if you do what Jimmy Kimmel wants you to do? That’s the way this works now? Who died and made him Jesus? Really, how did this work exactly? That Jimmy Kimmel gets to be the great moral arbiter of our time, a late night talk show host who used to host The Man Show with women bouncing on trampolines, he is now the great arbiter of what constitutes morality in politics, and if you disagree with him, your thoughts and prayers are insufficient? Doesn’t matter that you’re fervently praying for the victims. Doesn’t matter that you were donating your time or your blood. None of that matters; if you disagree with Jimmy Kimmel, what you’ve done today is insufficient; you must pay; you will burn in the fiery bowels of Jimmy Kimmel’s hell.
Just gross. This is just gross stuff. Again, I’m not doubting Jimmy Kimmel’s sincerity; I believe he is completely sincere. I’m doubting whether it is moral to doubt other people’s sincerity based on their political viewpoints. He continues:
Kimmel:
It’s a bill to legalize the sale of silencers for guns; this is what they’re working on. We have a major problem with gun violence in this country, and I guess they don’t care. If I’m wrong on that, fine, do something about it. Cause I’m sick of it.
Shapiro:
He’s sick of it. I guess we’re done here, gang. He’s sick of it, so I guess we’re done here, gang. As long as he’s sick of it, I guess that those rights just go out the window. Again, he’s bringing up silencers and suppressors? Stupid. There is no silencer or suppressor used in this crime, and if you use a suppressor, what people who don’t know what they’re talking about call a silencer, I mean the opposite, if you use a silencer, which is what a suppressor is, all it does is it reduces the sound from basically a gun shot to a jackhammer. So it’s still incredibly loud. Again, none of this has to do with anything that just happened in Vegas, but Jimmy Kimmel’s on a roll now; Bluto’s going. Don’t let’s stop him now; just let him roll. Again, he’s sick of it. He’s sick of it. And then he says, and then he talks about how he really wants to do comedy but he can’t, because he just feels too much.
Kimmel:
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 that — it seems to becoming increasingly difficult lately. It feels like someone has opened a window into hell. And what I’m talking about tonight isn’t about gun control; it’s about common sense. Common sense says no good will ever come from allowing a person to have weapons that can take down 527 Americans at a concert.
Shapiro:
Okay, pause it it right there. I know some good that can come from those people having those weapons; how about the cops who broke down the door so this guy killed himself? They all had these kinds of weapons; all of them. So clearly some people should have these weapons; it’s just not you. That’s what Kimmel is saying. Then he goes on, and we don’t have to do the rest of it, but basically he suggests, in the transcript he says, “The NRA fought to make sure people on the no-fly list can buy guns.”
Again, Teddy Kennedy was on the no-fly list. The problem with “no-fly, no buy,” is that the no-fly list was too broad and there is something called due process of law in the United States. He says that “no American citizen needs an M-16 or 10 of them.”
Okay, military-grade weaponry is largely illegal for private citizens to own in the United States, if you’re talking about something with automatic capacity. Machine guns have been banned in the United States since 1986. Any machine gun made after 1986 is illegal for you to own under federal law.
And then he says you should write your Congressperson and you should do something, and then he says he thinks its important and he finishes by saying, you know, I think it’s important. Okay, well, guess what? We all think it’s important. We all think it’s important. But you are not an expert just because you feel deeply. You feeling deeply does not make you an expert on a topic. It does not give you the background expertise. It does not give you the statistical expertise to talk about this stuff. Even people who study this stuff make statistical mistakes; I made one earlier today when I tweeted something out and corrected it.
The fact is Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t even bother with that kind of research. And the media are cheering him. Why? Because all that matters is the feelings. We can’t have a healthy body politic like this; we cannot. We cannot have a healthy body politic when the suggestion is that the people on the other side just don’t give a crap about their fellow Americans being shot and murdered in cold blood; they’re just being paid off by the NRA. That’s a recipe for people out in the streets hitting each other with clubs; that really is. This is a disaster area. Substituting emotion and emotional accusations for discourse that is reasoned and evidence-based is a huge mistake.
Jimmy Kimmel should not be cheered for what he said last night. Jimmy Kimmel should be asked to provide the evidence for his suppositions rather than the evidence for his emotions. Again, I believe he’s sincere. Sincerity does not make what you’re saying smart.
Video below: