Amy Schumer has skewered the American notion that to be American is to own a gun in her stint on Saturday Night Live. In a sarcastic PSA, a woman’s soothing voice narrates various situations of euphoria, shared moments of ‘love, family, connection… a sense of purpose’.
Just like in an advert for a charity or Hallmark cards, you see a grandchild chat to a grandparent, a man getting a taxi for his wife, who’s in labour, a woman jogging in the park, an awkward boy at a party looking to make eye contact with the hot girl across the room and Amy waiting for her date to turn up. The thing that all unites them? Guns ‘guns are always there. In little moments… and big ones’ Cue loads of emotional moments with respective guns, as if they’re adorable pets, something every person (even the newborn baby) wants and needs.
While SNL hasn’t actually got a reputation for speaking out against guns, or at least taking the piss out of them, Amy’s previously been very outspoken in favour of, you know, controlling who gets to use them.
After a mass shooting killing two people and injuring nine more in Lafayette, Louisiana, during a cinema screening of her film Trainwreck, Amy was sent an open letter by a fan whose mum was a survivor of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting. In the letter, Sarah Clements pleaded that Amy Schumer use her ‘voice for our generation and for women — two groups who make up most of the victims of the gun violence in our country’.
So she did, during a speech made with her cousin, senator Charles Schumer. ‘This should not have happened. It's a tragic, senseless and horrifying action from this man who should not have been able to put his hands on a gun in the first place.’
‘We can not allow dangerous people to continue to get their hands on guns... We can make sure that the mentally ill and felons do not get their hands on guns with enforced background checks. The time is now.’
She added: ‘This is the first time I have made public comments on this matter and I can promise you it won't be the last.'’
With a mass shooting in Inglis, Florida killing four people this weekend marking America’s 1000th since Sandy Hook, where a gunman shot 20 children and six staff members. Obama also told the crowd at a Democractic fundraiser this week: ‘We know we’ve got to do something to prevent the kind of gun massacres that we see with growing frequency in this country.’
Unfortunately, with Republicans holding the balance of power, he can’t just wave through a simple, well-meaning law that says, you know what, maybe it should be difficult for people to buy guns…
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Picture: NBC
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.