Jon Stewart recently interviewed an Oklahoma state senator about gun control because we all know that if you can out argue a single state senator then you must be right. Here is the clip.
Jon Stewart Gun Control Interview
Now, Jon’s argument is based on a verbal parallelism between gun registration and voter registration. However, the two things serve very different purposes—voter registration ensures only those legally entitled to vote do so and that they vote only once. There is already a mechanism in place that serves this purpose with guns, the background check. So, given that this already exists, Jon’s registration policy is either redundant or serving a totally different purpose.
So, Jon, how would you feel about a religious registry: We ask everyone what religion they are and they can only go to church, mosque, synagogue if they are registered for the appropriate religion. I mean, that wouldn’t be ominious, would it Jon? That wouldn’t be interfering with the fundamental right to practice your religion.
Voter registration is, fundamentally, a precaution against voter fraud: It is intended to police the two political parties, not infringe on individual liberty. Jon, of course, knows all this, but he is happy to pull the wool over your eyes if he can.
Jon Stewart: Grooming is okay because guns
Here Jon Stewart defends drag queen story hour because “guns are the leading killer of children.” First, the leading killer of children has historically been car accidents. It was only with the reduction in driving that came from Covid lockdowns that this changed. We can expect this relationship to revert back once reporting catches up to the post-Covid reality.
More importantly, these “children” are high school aged members of criminal gangs, not proper children, i.e. prepubescents. The overuse of the word children to include adolescents distorts the reality of what is going on. If we limit our numbers to proper children, we can see that swimming pools and alcohol related car crashes are, in fact, greater causes of death. These “children” killed by firearms are mostly minority youth in Democrat controlled cities where gun control is already in place.
So, let’s limit ourselves to actual children—ignoring high school students who are already deeply embedded in gang culture. Suddenly, if we do this, the roughly 30% of traffic fatalities that are the result of drunk driving overwhelm the number of actual children killed by guns, yet if I were to say that support for the rating system on films, which I admit is industry enforced but only because Congress dropped hints that it would enforce one if the industry did not impose one on itself, implied a prohibition on alcohol, Jon would claim that the two things were completely unrelated. Of course, a ban on drag queen story hour and the issue of private gun ownership are also unrelated.
Jon’s tactic of finding some relatively high-ranking local yokel and browbeating him in an argument is an incredibly weak one: Indeed, it is so transparent that the tactic would receive jeers from both sides of the aisle if a Republican were to attempt it. Testing your ideas against some random state senator and claiming they have been vindicated is like testing a chess opening against a 1500-rated player and claiming that it must be a great opening because you one. Uneven contests are not proper tests. Jon knows this, which is why you will never see Ben Shapiro or Mussad Ayoob on his program. If your ideas are so grand, why are you testing them out against weak opponents, Jon?