Comedian and libertarian Penn Jillette stood up for the Second Amendment, Tuesday, offering a rare non-liberal perspective on Comedy Central's Nightly Show. In typical liberal media fashion, Jillette was outnumbered three-to-one. After contributor Ricky Velez made the tired argument that the Second Amendment was about muskets, Jillette zinged, "But, unfortunately, with that exact same argument on the First Amendment, you have real trouble, too."
Highlighting that speech now includes the internet and television, he added, "... The First Amendment has been broadened tremendously beyond what the Founding Fathers intended and I'm all for that."
After Brina Milikowsky, of the pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Saftey, cited restricive laws, Jillette retorted, "But you have to keep saying over and over that violence keeps going down, even when we don't do those things." As Pew polling found, "Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew."
Nightly Show host Larry Willmore highlighted Rick Perry's call for less gun control and lamented, "But what makes this so hard is that a lot of people agree with Rick Perry. Guns are so central to our culture. Unfortunately, guns are who we are."
He condescendingly lectured, "We don't need a national conversation about guns. We need a national conversation about us."
A partial transcript of the July 28 Nightly Show segment below:
11:48
LARRY WILMORE: Do we have any common sense solutions? Maybe from one of our future leaders, someone who is running for president in 2016.
JAKE TAPPER: You seem to be suggesting a solution to the problem would be to allow patrons in the movie theater to bring guns with them into the movie theater.
RICK PERRY: I think that it makes a lot of sense.
WILMORE: No! No! No! It does the opposite of the thing you says it does. It makes no sense, You realize we watch movies in the dark, right? People can't even silence their cell phones in movie theaters. They are not ready for loaded firearms. Are you kidding me? But what makes this so hard is that a lot of people agree with Rick Perry. Guns are so central to our culture. Unfortunately, guns are who we are. We don't need a national conversation about guns. We need a national conversation about us.
...
11:52
RICKY VELEZ (Nightly Show contributor): But at the same time, when that [the Second Amendment] was written, they had muskets. It's a lot harder to shoot up a movie theater with a musket. It's going to take two and a half hours.
PENN JILLETTE: But, unfortunately, with that exact same argument on the First Amendment, you have real trouble too.
VELEZ: But at the same time, we're evolving as people.
JILLETTE: Absolutely. And what we're doing when we're evolving as people –
VELEZ: Shouldn't the Constitution?
JILLETTE: First of all the First Amendment has been broadened tremendously beyond what the Founding Fathers intended and I'm all for that. The other thing is that we are evolving tremendously to be less violent. We are much less violent. There is, I am sure you know all these facts much more than I do, there is much more, many more guns sold in the United States, but many fewer families that have them, they are concentrated arsenals in small numbers of people.
...BRINA MILIKOWSKY (Chief Strategy Officer, Everytown for Gun Safety) : Our research shows that there are systematic steps we can take to close holes in our gun laws and strengthen the gun laws.
PENN JILLETTE: When we don't do that, violence still goes down.
MILIKOWSKY: We are a nation of laws.
JILLETTE: I am not disagreeing agreeing with you. I'm not disagreeing with you.
MILIKOWSKY: No law is going to stop every crime. There are states that require background checks for every gun sales, for example. There are fewer women shot to death by intimate partners. There are fewer law enforcement officers killed with handguns. There's less gun trafficking. You shut down those easy avenues –
JILLETTE: But you have to keep saying over and over that violence keeps going down, even when we don't do those things.
