Late-night hosts Colbert, Meyers, blast GOP for proposing heightened school security
CBS’ Stephen Colbert and NBC’s Seth Meyers criticized Republicans for tougher school security measures, including armed teachers, officers, and defensive mechanisms.
Following the Tuesday school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, liberal late-night show hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers took to mocking Republicans after they proposed heightened security measures at American schools.
Reacting to a comment from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who recently asserted that arming teachers and implementing new school security strategies was something that "absolutely should be done," both Colbert and Meyers knocked down the idea in a series of jokes.
Colbert, during his Wednesday CBS show, at one point said that it’s not that Republicans have no solutions to curb future gun violence, they just have "bad ones."
"A teacher’s job is not to use a gun. A teacher’s job is to teach and to rap about Shakespeare," Colbert said.
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Late-night host Stephen Colbert while hosting the Emmys in 2017. (Cliff Lipson/CBS via Getty Images)
Colbert also threw cold water on other ideas by Republicans, conservative commentators and media personalities, such as the implementation of retired police officers and ex-military in and around schools.
"That is there brilliant answer to our epidemic of gun violence. Arm the seniors. They shouldn’t be hard to find, they’re all members of the AAR-15," Colbert joked as a picture of senior citizens wielding rifles and handguns popped up on screen.
Meyers was also less than enthused by ideas that did not end in gun control, claiming that if the "grotesque" ideas of conservatives came to fruition everything would become a scene out of "f---ing RoboCop."
Host Seth Meyers during the monologue on December 16, 2021 (Photo by: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
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"Are you out of your f---ing mind?" Meyers asked at one point. "You guys want to turn schools into maximum security prisons with mantraps and tripwires and teachers carrying guns?"
Meyers added that Republicans are more than willing to throw money at schools in order to arm teachers but are not willing to fund schools to get students history books that "don’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall."
A law enforcement personnel lights a candle outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Wednesday, May 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
The NBC comedy host also hit back at the people who "cynically parrot the mindless talking point" that advocates for gun reform are "somehow politicizing" the most recent tragedy.
"What else is politics for?" Meyers wondered. "It’s a crisis and this is what our political system is supposed to do, address the crisis. If that’s all you can muster in the wake of this horror, that tired, empty mantra, then you need to look inward."