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Late-night hosts balance comedy and tragedy after Texas school rampage

Stephen Colbert called the number of guns in the U.S. ‘criminally insane’; Seth Meyers got emotional discussing his school-aged kids

Updated May 26, 2022 at 1:10 p.m. EDT|Published May 26, 2022 at 7:53 a.m. EDT
Seth Meyers said on his Wednesday show that “entrenched, powerful forces” have tricked Americans into believing it is their “constitutional right to own arsenals and military-grade weaponry.” (Lloyd Bishop/NBC)
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Seth Meyers knew he’d have to address millions of viewers after national tragedies when he took a late-night hosting gig eight years ago.

“I can remember thinking, ‘Man, it’s going to be difficult to start a show talking about a mass shooting and then pivoting to doing jokes and sketches. That will be so hard,’ ” Meyers said during his Wednesday show.

Then, the host of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” said he’d done something even more difficult that morning, less than 24 hours after a gunman massacred 21 people — including 19 children — at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex.

The father of three dropped off his own kids at school.

“That’s harder,” the comedian said, choking up.

Meyers and his fellow hosts of normally funny late-night shows wrestled this week with addressing the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Some hosts interviewed guests with expertise in the politics of gun control or the killing power of the AR-15 rifle. Some used their monologues to lament years of inaction, even as the country swelled with more guns than people while being pummeled with a seemingly endless series of mass shootings.

Jimmy Kimmel started his Wednesday show blaming politicians, specifically those who have stymied what he called “common sense” gun-control laws or fought to ease existing regulations.

Then the host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” expanded the list, telling his viewers that they, other Americans and himself were also to blame.

“This is not their fault anymore,” Kimmel said of politicians. “This is now our fault because we get angry, we demand action, we don’t get it, they wait it out, we go back to the lives that we should rightfully be able to go back to.”

But nothing changes and children keep dying, he said.

(In North Texas, some viewers were concerned when local ABC affiliate WFAA cut away to a commercial in the middle of Kimmel’s monologue. The Dallas-based station later explained that it was a technical error — the automated system for cueing up commercial breaks had not been recalibrated to synch with the broadcast delay caused by an extension of the 10 p.m. newscast for additional coverage of the Uvalde shooting. The station apologized and posted Kimmel’s full monologue online. Kimmel tweeted that he understood “this mistake was made unintentionally.”)

Over on CBS, Stephen Colbert took a similar tack on his Tuesday show, asking viewers to join him in praying for leaders to “show a modicum of courage in trying to prevent this from ever happening again.” Then Colbert conceded that those prayers were most likely a Hail Mary.

“Prayers won’t end this. Voting might,” he continued. “So when you vote, ask yourself this question: Who running for office has publicly stated that they’re willing do anything and everything in their power to prevent your children from the criminally insane number of guns in America?”

There are nearly 400 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States — about 46 percent of the world’s total, according to the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey.

“Americans have witnessed gun tragedy after gun tragedy. And while it can be argued that there are many reasons, we all know the biggest reason for the tragedy is the gun,” Colbert said during his Wednesday show.

But it was perhaps Meyers who dove deepest by devoting one of his “A Closer Look” segments to “America’s Urgent Gun Crisis and the Rewriting of the Second Amendment.” In the 13-minute piece, he asserted that “entrenched, powerful forces” have convinced Americans that it is their “constitutional right to own arsenals and military-grade weaponry.”

Meyers then played a 1991 clip of former Supreme Court chief justice Warren E. Burger saying that if he rewrote the Bill of Rights, “there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment.” Burger, who retired from the court in 1986, said the amendment “was the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud … on the American public.”

The Founding Fathers required that a militia be “well-regulated” for the Second Amendment to apply, so why wouldn’t anyone else “be regulated in the use of arms the way an automobile is regulated?” Burger asked his interviewer rhetorically.

The video cut back to Meyers. “He’s right, the words ‘well-regulated’ are right there in the amendment. There’s no mystery.”

Then, without missing a beat, the late-night host made the pivot he had prophesied eight years ago as he kept riffing about the Constitution.

“It’s not Wordle or the New York Times Spelling Bee,” Meyers said. “We don’t have to guess.”

Updated to note the Dallas TV station’s apology for accidentally interrupting Kimmel’s monologue.