Trevor Noah

On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah continued to address this weekend’s deadly shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, as he debunked conservative commentators’ attempts to distract from the issue of guns.

While many legislators are seeking to expand background checks, reinstate the assault weapons ban or ban high-capacity magazines, “according to [former Arkanasas governor Mike] Huckabee and many people on the right, the real problem in America is not access to guns, it’s a lack of access to God”.

According to Fox News, there’s no “gun” in “America’s gun violence epidemic.” pic.twitter.com/IfMk5UeUZP — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 7, 2019

Besides religion, Fox News – also known as “the Presidential Advisory Network”, according to Noah – also proposed better parenting. It’s not the worst argument in the world, Noah admitted; “it does help young men to have a stable family life. But it’s also hard to have a stable family life if your dad is getting gunned down at a Walmart.”

Finally, Noah examined the logic of the Fox News host Sean Hannity, who insisted on his show post-El Paso that the safest path forward was an armed guard in every hall of every school and mall.

“Every hall of every mall? That sounds like the bleakest Dr Seuss book ever,” Noah said, riffing: “In every hall of every mall, on every floor and every door, we need a guard in every room or we’ll end up in the tomb.”

Fixing the problem with more guns is not a new idea, Noah said, but what Hannity and others “seem to forget is that guns are everywhere in America”. An armed guard could not stop the carnage at Parkland. The police did everything right in Dayton – subduing the shooter in less than 30 seconds – but he still killed nine people.

Guns are everywhere, Noah said, “so are you going to put an armed guard in every Walmart? Every movie theater, every synagogue, every mosque, every church, every office building, every bar, every nightclub, every concert, every garlic festival?”

The strangest part of this logic for him, Noah concluded, was this: “Hannity and Fox News talk every day about protecting American freedoms, but if everyone in America is forced to live in a world of perimeter fences, metal detectors and armed guards in every hall, then it starts to feel like society is living in a prison, and the only thing that’s free is the gun.”

Stephen Colbert

“One of the disheartening aspects of the aftermath of any one of these tragedies, far too many, is how predictable every stage will be,” Stephen Colbert said to open his second show since the shootings that claimed 31 lives this weekend. “It makes you feel as though you are living the same tragedy over and over again.”

One of those typical stages is the president paying condolences at the site of the tragedy, as Donald Trump was scheduled to do on Wednesday in El Paso. There’s just one problem, Colbert said: El Paso doesn’t want him to visit. The city’s Democratic representative, Veronica Escobar, said on TV that “from my perspective, he is not welcome here”.

“It really speaks to your leadership when a town in mourning after an unspeakable tragedy thinks you would bring the mood down,” Colbert said.

The situation is doubly awkward, Colbert added, because the president still owes the city of El Paso $470,000 after he hosted a rally there in February. The city claims it has sent Trump multiple invoices, with one from the comptroller reading: “We realize this may be an oversight on your part.”

Colbert had a short answer for that question: “Nope.

“Trump famously doesn’t pay anybody. He owes $20,000 to the leave a penny, take a penny industry.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers focused on the New York Times’s headline on Trump’s national address over the shootings. “After four years of spewing racist, anti-immigrant vitriol, President Trump read a scripted denunciation off the teleprompter yesterday,” Meyers said, a speech the Times headlined: “Trump urges unity vs. racism”. (Facing criticism, the paper changed the headline for subsequent editions.)

In a segment called “Hey!” Meyers broke down the headline’s inaccuracy. “You can’t say someone urged something when they do it completely without urgency,” he said. “[Trump is] already back to quoting Fox News and attacking people on Twitter again today. A better headline would’ve been: ‘Teleprompter urges unity while old man watches.’”

The headline was “so weird”, Meyers joked, “it was like when you read a newspaper left behind by a time traveler in a sci-fi movie and realize you’re in an alternate timeline – Trump urges unity? Cleveland Browns win Super Bowl?

“New York Times, we depend on you,” Meyers concluded. “We need you to learn the lessons of 2016, and one of them is don’t just uncritically repeat whatever this president reads off a teleprompter, because he never means it.”