Samantha Bee had some big news to announce last night on Full Frontal. Apparently her trailblazing has worked: as she puts it, she’s “no longer the only female late night host, thanks to a brand new channel that just launched!” Now, of course, if such news were legitimate, surely there would have already been an outpour of press coverage, so the second Bee says, “just launched” you do feel there’s something sinister waiting in a punchline.
And indeed there is. The channel she speaks of is Gun TV, which on its website describes itself as “proud to offer [their] consumer audience an exciting mix of unique content, a wide range of firearms and related products and services.” (They also emphasize that they provide educational services…along with their firearm vending QVC-esque model, presumably to help you accidentally kill people a bit less.)
“If viewers see a weapon at a price they like, they can just click online, or pick up the phone and dial a toll-free number,” explained the Guardian in December, back when news of the then-upcoming channel first broke.
And so Samantha Bee launches into a brief, hilarious, and wholly maddening introduction to yet another new platform for American firearm-fetishizing ridiculousness. Bee shares clips from the channel’s programming, including footage of one “late night host” innocuously describing a gun as though it were a pair of earrings from the Joan Rivers Classics Collection. She isolates a moment where the program made “herstory,” wherein the televised gun saleswoman brought up “girl power” before launching into a pitch for a 709 Slim 9mm Pistol, and another woman explained how “empowered” she felt after holding the for-sale weapons.
Watch: