Almost two weeks after demolishing Jimmy Kimmel over his asinine health-care tirades, conservative star and podcast host Ben Shapiro obliterating the ABC late-night host on Tuesday for an “abhorrent, “gross,” and “nasty” gun control rant touting confiscation and mauling those against his views as monstrous.
“Jimmy Kimmel should not cheered for what he did last night. Jimmy Kimmel should be asked to provide the evidence for his suppositions rather than the evidence for his emotions. Again, I believe he’s sincere. Sincerity does not make what you’re saying smart,” Shapiro argued at the end of his podcast, which featured over 20 minutes on Kimmel’s post-Las Vegas shooting rant.
Shapiro noted at the onset that “Kimmel did something last night that I find truly abhorrent” which was discard any and all facts as part of his effort to “become the social justice king of late-night television” and “all-heart representation of all leftist causes.”
Setting up the first clip, Shapiro masterfully laid out why Kimmel’s behavior was so “really nasty” and a reason why leftists like him are the true dividers of America [emphasis mine]:
Last night, he did a long shitck about gun control that was entirely based on emotion and it was really nasty. It was really nasty. I don’t think it was nasty because he doesn’t care. He cares. It’s really nasty because he’s suggesting that you and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter that you lost sleep last night and I lost sleep because of what happened. It doesn’t matter that we’re all heartbroken over what happened. We don’t agree with Jimmy Kimmel’s evidence-less suggestions about gun control. That means that we don’t care. We are bad people. You want to know why the country is not unified? It’s because of stuff like this. It’s not because we disagree on policy. We’ve been disagreeing about policy forever. It’s because there are certain people in the American public discourse who feel it necessary to impute bad motives to people who disagree and that’s what Kimmel’s doing here.
Following the second clip, Shapiro noted that Kimmel undermined his own cause by noting how that the shooter “passed a federal background check, no history of mental illness, his brother didn’t know anything was wrong with him.”
Similarly, Kimmel harmed his case by mentioning travel bans and wiretaps following Islamic terror attacks even though he himself has been on the record against both of those policies.
“I don’t assume he doesn’t care about terrorism. I’m sure he does. He just disagrees about the policy, so why can’t he grant us the same sort of credibility? We care about what happened in Vegas. We just disagree on the policy,” Shapiro opined, granting Kimmel the courtesy the deranged leftist won’t give to those he disagrees with.
On Kimmel’s notion that AR-15s should be outlawed since they look too much like military guns, Shapiro annihilated that claim:
So, number one, the Founders would have wanted us to have AR-15s because the fact is, back in the day, all the weapons that people had were military grade weapons, right? A musket was a military-grade weapon. Now, AR-15s aren’t military grade.....Civilian guns are very different from military-issued guns. For him to say the Second Amendment doesn’t cover things like AR-15s — a semi-automatic rifle, is akin to me saying the First Amendment doesn’t cover TV because the Founders hadn’t seen a TV, would never know what it’d look like, and don’t understand how it works. It’s a silly argument. As far as the idea that ARs aren’t used for home defense, again, asinine. I have a bunch of friends who use ARs for home defense.
The Daily Wire founder also camped out on Kimmel’s lewd suggestion that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has the testicles of Republicans tied up and bribe them to do their bidding.
“When he says the NRA is going to smother it in money, the NRA is not among the top dozen spenders in the American political system. The NRA does not give a lot of money to politicians. The NRA is a very powerful force because there are millions of people who are members,” Shapiro explained, armed with actual facts.
He continued:
The reason the American people are not willing to — to elect representatives to repeal some of the Second Amendment rights is because we’re not willing to do that, not because the NRA is bribing people. It’s amazing. Democrats never make this argument about unions that give tons of cash to Democrats that unions are bribing people but they make this argument about the NRA that is actively not bribing people....This is what passes for brilliance and common sense in Hollywood.
After denouncing Kimmel’s lies about a February law signed by President Trump on gun ownership (backed by the ACLU), Shapiro circled back to this utterly offensive assault on the NRA:
The idea that the NRA has anybody’s balls in a money clip is not true. It is just not true. Their constituents don’t want them to do the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about because the stuff Jimmy Kimmel is talking about is not correct, okay? The NRA is not bribing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Again, this is just him attributing bad motives to these politicians. ‘They really don’t believe what they believe, you see, they just don’t care enough and they’d rather be paid blood money for dead people in Las Vegas.’ Just absurd.
Shapiro again had to explain how the gun-show loophole is fake news (in addition what silencers do). At one point, he grew frustrated after one clip in which Kimmel smeared those sending thoughts and prayers to Vegas victims but don’t want massive gun control [emphasis mine]:
Who died and who made Jimmy Kimmel God? Who’s Jimmy Kimmel to decide whether thoughts — your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient? So, your thoughts and prayers are only sufficient if you do what Jimmy Kimmel wants you to do? That’s the way this works now? Who died and made him Jesus? Like, really, how did this work again exactly that Jimmy Kimmel gets to be the great moral arbiter of our time? A late-night talk show host who used to host The Man Show with women bouncing on trampolines? He’s now the great arbiter of what constitutes morality in politics and if you disagree with him, your thoughts and prayers are insufficient. Doesn’t matter that you were fervently praying for the victims, doesn’t matter that you were donating your time or your blood. None of that matter if you disagree with Jimmy Kimmel, what you’ve done today is insufficient. You must pay. You will burn in the fiery bowels of Jimmy Kimmel’s hell. Just gross. This is just gross stuff. Okay, again, I’m not doubting Jimmy Kimmel’s sincerity, I believe he is completely sincere. I am doubting whether it is moral to doubt other people’s sincerity based on their political viewpoint.
Kimmel also put forth the idea that gun control is the good that will arise from the Vegas shooting, but Shapiro quickly put that claim to rest:
I know some good that can come from those people having weapons? How about those cops who broke down the doors so this guy killed himself? They all had these kinds of weapons. All of them. So, clearly some people should have these weapons. It’s just not you. That’s what Kimmel is saying.
Once he reiterated that “military-grade weapons” are “largely illegal for private citizens to own in the United States” and machine guns banned since 1986, Shapiro arrived at his conclusion, which stated in part:
Guess what? We all think it’s important. We all think it’s important, but you are not expert just because you feel deeply. You feeling deeply does not make you an expert on a topic. It does not give you the background and expertise. It does not give you the statistical expertise to talk about this stuff. Even people who study this make statistical mistakes. I made one earlier today when I tweeted something out and corrected it. The fact is Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t even bother with that kind of research and the media are cheering him. Why? Because all the matters is the feelings. We can’t have a healthy, bodied politic like this. We cannot. We cannot have a healthy body politic when the suggestion is that people on the other side just don’t give a crap about their fellow Americans being shot and murdered in cold blood. ‘There’s just being paid off by the NRA.’ That’s a recipe for people out in the streets hitting each other with gloves. That really is. This is a disaster area. Substituting emotion and emotional accusations for discourse that is reasoned and evidence-based is a huge mistake.
Shapiro spent the first portion of his eponymous show providing listeners with the facts on current gun laws, which is worth the time whether one is an informed citizen or novice.
Earlier, he set the table for his Kimmel takedown by addressing other rants by supposed comics Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert. Shapiro referred to Noah as “the least-funny man in America” and clueless for thinking the country is afraid to talk about guns.
“Is he deaf or insane? We don’t talk about guns in America? It’s all we talk about after every shooting....What the hell is he talking about? What the — he’s never been to a country where, as a people, are afraid to talk about guns? Is he out of his mind? Is he crazy? I mean, Democrats have been talking incessantly about guns for years,” Shapiro stated before and after a clip from Noah’s diatribe.
As for Colbert, Shapiro took issue with the CBS host’s use of the term “common sense”:
In order for you to have common sense about a subject, first, you have to know what the hell you’re talking about, okay? Common sense doesn’t just come along in the wind. If you don’t know how a gun operates, then you don’t get to talk about common sense gun solutions....It’s do something, do something, but all the things he says to do have either been tried or failed or they have been counterproductive, right? All the stuff that the left likes to talk about — these things like universal background checks...When you buy a gun from a federally-licensed firearm dealer, you actually have to go and get a background check...This is — under federal law. Universal background checks already exist.
