Just like President Obama, Stephen Colbert is fed up with the "routine" of mass shootings. Following his opening monologue on The Late Show last night, Colbert addressed the shooting at Umpqua Community College on Thursday, in which gunman Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and wounded several others.
Colbert began with a meditation on pretending, "something that I know a little bit about." He said that he often makes things up as he goes along, but that in the face of this tragedy, "the least we can do is not pretend that we always know what to do or say." Then he pinpointed the country's overwhelming frustration with an endless string of mass shootings as only a late-night host can:
I can't pretend to know what to do to prevent what happened yesterday or all the times it has happened before. But I think pretending is part of the problem. These things happen over and over again, and we are naturally horrified and shocked when we hear about them. But then we change nothing, and we pretend that it won't happen again.
In the aftermath of the shooting, President Obama promised to push for stricter gun-control laws, but he also reiterated the need for support from Congress and from state and local legislatures.
