Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Trevor Noah Is Not About To Let Republicans Get Away With Attacking Florida Shooting Survivors

It’s not easy to be a late night talk show host these days. It’s a rare month that we don’t wake up to a headline detailing Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional monologue after yet another national tragedy.

Most recently, the talk show hosts have been contending with the Florida school shooting that claimed the lives of 17 teenagers and faculty members. In the past week, many of the survivors have organized rallies to demand that Congress pass gun laws to prevent this kind of shooting to happen again.

A reasonable reaction to the senseless death of your classmates and teachers, right?

Not according to many Republicans who have attacked these teens in the media over the past week.

Trevor Noah confronted some of these critics Wednesday night.

The host took particular offense to the idea that the teens speaking up about gun control weren’t familiar enough with the issue for their opinions to matter.

“These kids may not be professors of guns but maybe being in a mass shooting gets you an honorary degree,” said Noah. “You do realize if people were allowed to share their opinions unless they had studied the issue, Donald Trump would never be allowed to speak right?”

Noah also poked fun at the idea that the teens advocating for stricter gun laws were the puppets of adult Democrats and he scoffed at the conspiracy theories that are, unsurprisingly in this day and age, spreading rapidly on the Internet. But he saved his most succinct take for the end of the bit.

“Most of what they’re arguing boils down to one idea: teenagers are too young, too emotional to inexperienced to talk about guns. But as soon as they turn 18 they can own as many of those bad boys as they want.”

There is no argument as effective as the cold, hard truth.

Becky Scott is the editor of The Schmooze. Follow her on Twitter, @arr_scott

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.