“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in America, there’s only one way to stop a bad guy with a gun,” Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show Thursday night, setting up an impressive two-part field piece in which correspondent Jordan Klepper set out to do his “duty” and become that elusive “good guy with a gun” conservatives are always going on about.
With nothing but a written application and eight-hour NRA-approved gun safety course, Klepper was able to obtain his concealed-carry license, going from “gun idiot to idiot with a gun” in no time.
But was that enough to make him qualified to handle active-shooter situations? Not according to a representative from ALERRT, which trains cops to take out mass shooters. When Klepper entered the school-shooting simulation using a gun armed with paintball-like bullets, he was immediately “killed” before he ever fired a shot himself.
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In another simulation, he accidentally shot an unarmed teen before getting mistaken for a “bad guy” and getting shot by authorities.
“Why was that so hard?” he wondered. “That was nothing like Call of Duty.”
As Klepper soon learned, according to an FBI report that covered active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013, only about 3 percent of those shootings were stopped by a civilian and most of those civilians were unarmed.
In the end, Klepper came up with two potential solutions to America’s gun problem.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is figure out who the good guys are, get millions of them to volunteer for 300 hours of training a year, costing billions of dollars, and make sure they’re in the right place at the right time, guns at the ready, and place this civilian army in our 4,700 colleges, 5,700 hospitals, 48,000 malls, hundreds of thousands of churches. You know, America.”
Or, we could just figure out how to prevent “assholes” from getting guns in the first place.
