Because reality can’t be all furries and games, Last Week Tonight also got serious this week with John Oliver’s response to the Ulvade mass school shooting. Given that Oliver was on mini-hiatus in the immediate aftermath of that shooting, however, he ended up delivering a response to the GOP response, which didn’t seem too productive (given that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants to send fake school-invaders out to freak everyone out), and as Oliver (who has been nailing this subject for over a decade) points out, it’s actually quite counterproductive.
The GOP also wants to beef up law enforcement’s presence inside of schools, and (via Hollywood Reporter), Oliver detailed how most of the recently 54,000 officers ended up filling their time by citing kids who threw paper airplanes or candy, which led the host to declare (of one unfortunate incident), “[C]learly the only thing [they] were guilty of was being a f*cking 5-year-old.”
From there, Oliver showed that he clearly has no patience for the door obsession of the GOP, so the host brought it home:
“When we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation, we not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence, we condemn them to a system that criminalizes the very essence of childhood. Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested, to be sad and angry without being body-slammed. They deserve to have tantrums, throw carrots, do science experiments, talk shite and carve their names into stuff without risking ending up in the back of a police car. They deserve to be curious, to make mistakes, to go a little too car, to be a little too loud, to basically be a f*cking kid. And they definitely deserve better than the fundamental lie the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can arrest a 5-year-old.”
Watch the full segment above.
(Via Hollywood Reporter)