By Sean Davis
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Trevor Noah, the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show,
accidentally destroyed the case for gun control during his show on Wednesday
night.
Noah’s accidental broadside against gun-free zones came
during a portion of his opening monologue in which he made fun of a Minnesota
man fed up with Islamic terrorism. The target of Noah’s ire was an ice cream
shop owner in a small town southeast of St. Cloud, Minnesota — the site of a
mass stabbing at a mall last weekend — who put up a sign outside of his
restaurant that read, “Muslims Get Out.”
Noah mocked the store owner for a little bit, but then he
moved on to the meat of his opening bit by mocking the man’s rationale for his
“Muslims Get Out” sign:
You know what’s also strange is
this man genuinely thought people who go around blowing people up would be
stopped by a sign? You realize you’re talking to terrorists, not vampires. They
don’t need to be invited in, alright? Or maybe he’s onto something, because if
you think about it, we’ve never tried that. We’ve never actually tried to repel
terrorists with signs. Yeah, maybe that’s all the airports need is a sign that
says “No Terrorists,” yes? Yeah, and then guys are going to be walking going,
“Oh, I was going to blow up the airport, but the rules are rules and they said
I can’t come in. They said I can’t. They said I can’t come in.”
Does that argument sound familiar?
Noah probably doesn’t know it, but he just accidentally
made an airtight case against gun-free zones in particular and gun control in
general. He is 100 percent correct: people hell-bent on murdering as many
people as possible don’t really care about silly signs or laws that tell them
not to murder people. A sign that says “No Guns” will no more keep a violent
jihadi from gunning down a bunch of innocent people than will a sign that says
“Muslims Get Out.” And how do we know that gun-free zones, nearly always marked
with signs designating them as such, don’t deter murderous psychopaths? Because
mass shootings, rather than happening at gun ranges or in gun stores, keep
happening in gun-free zones.
Contrary to Trevor Noah’s snarky assertion that “we’ve
never tried to repel terrorists with signs,” our country has fecklessly tried
for years to “repel terrorists with signs.”
The Sandy Hook massacre? Gun-free zone. Columbine?
Gun-free zone. The Aurora movie theater shooting? Gun-free zone. The shooting
last year at an Oregon community college? Gun-free zone. The shooting at a
movie theater in Lafayette? Gun-free zone. The attack on a military recruiting
center in Chattanooga? Gun-free zone. The Ft. Hood shooting? You guessed it:
gun-free zone. The San Bernardino attack? Gun-free zone. And the massacre
perpetrated by an ISIS enthusiast at an Orlando night club? Gun-free zone.
While Noah clearly doesn’t grasp the logical implications
of his argument, his particular insight — that evil people who want to do evil
things will find ways to carry out their schemes regardless of what signs you
post or laws you pass — forms the foundation of the entire argument against gun
control.
Bad people who want to murder you don’t care about your
stupid signs and stupid laws.
New York City, for example, is a pressure cooker
bomb-free zone. That mall in Minnesota was most definitely a weaponized
knife-free zone. And yet… Terrorists don’t care that terrorism is illegal. They
care about killing you. And they’ll kill you with whatever they can, whether
it’s a gun, a knife, a pressure cooker, or a box cutter.
“Yeah, but this just proves we need to have stricter gun
laws to prevent terrorists from getting guns in the first place,” Trevor Noah
might respond. “Gun control is about more than just signs telling people not to
do stuff.”
Except it’s not. The entire premise of gun control is
that words on a piece of paper somewhere will prevent a terrorist from killing
people. What is a law if not a sign that says what you’re allowed and not
allowed to do? Yet time and time and time and time again, strict gun control
regimes have completely failed to prevent mass murderers from committing mass
murder. Chicago and Washington, D.C., have some of the strictest gun control
laws in the nation, yet those laws have done little to stem the tide of gun
crime in those cities.
As Trevor Noah demonstrated via his mockery of the
Minnesota man with the “Muslims Get Out” sign at his restaurant, the logic of
gun control that says signs forbidding bad stuff stops bad stuff from happening
is nonsensical. “Words stop bad things from happening” is just dumb. A sign
that says “Muslims Get Out” will do absolutely nothing to prevent radical
Islamists from wreaking havoc. Trevor Noah understands this. If only he would
learn to apply his logic to the argument from gun controllers that all we need
to end violence are a few more signs telling terrorists not to use guns.
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