In the wake of the shooting in Orlando, which resulted in the death of 49 people who had been attending a Latinx night at gay club Pulse, plenty of politicians have spoken out on Twitter and in the news. They haven’t been saying much, though, just offering thoughts and prayers. Even Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, said that the best thing people could do was pray. Well, as Samantha Bee said last night on Full Frontal, prayer hasn’t stopped these things from happening before, and praying now isn’t going to make a single goddamn difference.
But she was angrier than that. Here’s how she opened the show:
“Hi, I’m Samantha Bee, welcome to Full Frontal. Well, here we are. After a massacre, the standard operating procedure is that you stand on stage and deliver some well-meaning words on how we will get through this together, how love wins, how love conquers hate, and that is great. That is beautiful. But, you know what? Fuck it. I am too angry for that. Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems.”
It only gets better (or worse) from there, as she exposes Rick Scott’s legal record, which has resulted in the sweeping ease of regulations on firearms and their sales. The AR-15, which has sadly been branded as “America’s Favorite Gun,” can now be purchased with absolutely no waiting time, for example, and people who had been placed on a terror watch list are not exempt from that benefit. Bee even makes note of Obama’s statements two weeks ago, made during a PBS Town Hall, in which he calls out this oversight and its absurdity. What’s more, it’s likely that the Orlando shooter purchased his AR-15 just a week after Obama made those statements.
Watch the clip below. To see Bee so fired up is sad and invigorating. Far too often, broadcast journalists have reacted to these occurrences of violence with a kind of resignation, parading victims’ families in front of the American public in order to secure ratings and, yeah, humanize the victims that would otherwise be lost as statistics. The latter is essential, and part of the process of properly grieving as a country. But one could only imagine what kind of change the combined rage of all TV anchors could bring about. But for now, we’ve only got Sam Bee.