Here’s Why You Can’t Trust the Drive-By-Media
14th December 2015
Read it. Note especially the title: Here’s Why the Good Guy With the Gun Always Gets Killed. From that you would expect a rigorous examination of all available cases where a person with a gun attempted to stop an ‘active shooter’, which invariably ended with the gun-bearer getting killed. But you would be wrong.
On Thursday night, The Daily Show focused on this idea of “the good guy with a gun,” and the results weren’t pretty.
Jordan Klepper, one of the comedian-correspondents who stayed behind after Jon Stewart’s departure from the show, actually went through the process of getting a carry license from the state of Florida, which is valid in more than 30 states. All that was required was mailing in a form and taking a few hours of training in New Jersey.
So. One guy. a ‘comedian-correspondent’. One. Guy. Who presumably was opposed to the concept a priori.
As you might expect, he blows it in every scenario. But! All is not lost while there’s spin to be spun.
For those who would write this off as a comedian for an openly liberal show simply failing on purpose to prove a point, the weary resignation on the faces of his trainers told a different story. The problem wasn’t Klepper’s clowning, but his belief, founded on a lifetime of action movies and video games, that in the right scenario, he could be a hero. The truth was, he just made things worse.
Pardon me for thinking that the reason why ‘he just made things worse’ is precisely because he’s a comedian for an openly-liberal show simply failing, not necessarily on purpose. He was not, as we say, motivated to succeed. And from this they draw the totally unwarranted conclusion that everybody in such a situation will get the same result. Which conclusion is not only false on its face but contrary to all of the available evidence from real-world situations.