In the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, Samantha Bee opened Full Frontal Monday night without the usual music and applause. She began her show by saying that although protocol after a mass shooting is usually to offer well-meaning words of support, she was too angry.
“Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems,” Bee implored, before cutting to a C-SPAN clip of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), an outspoken proponent of gun control, speaking on the floor to Congress about the number of victims lost to gun violence in 2015.
She then focused on the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, who “beat his ex-wife..had been reported multiple times to his employer as homophobic and unhinged, and the FBI had twice questioned him for ties to terrorism—but none of these things disqualified him from legally buying a gun that shoots 45 rounds a minute.”
“But hey, who could have predicted letting suspected extremists buy guns was a bad idea?” Bee says, cutting to a video of President Obama explaining only two weeks ago that although he could put U.S. citizens suspected of having ties to ISIS on the no-fly list, he was powerless in restricting their access to legally obtaining a weapon, “because of the National Rifle Association.”
Pointing out that Australia (“also hated by ISIS,” reads a graphic onscreen) has not had a mass shooting since the country’s parliament passed strict gun laws in 1996, Bee then criticized Florida Governor Rick Scott, who said the most important thing to do in the wake of the shooting was to pray.
“There is no shortage of troubled twenty-somethings out there, and whether they’re radicalized by ISIS, or homophobia, or white nationalism, or a dislike of movies,” she said, “we are making it far too easy for their derangement to kill us.”
