Stephen Colbert Gives An Inspiring Response To The Texas Church Massacre: ‘Hopelessness Is Not The Answer’

It is easy to think you’ve heard every response on mass shootings to this point, with politicians offering prayers, battle lines being drawn on Twitter, and talk show hosts sharing their shock with the world. The responses to the shooting in Texas on Sunday have followed this similar path. It wasn’t too long ago that we experienced this exact thing with the horrifying mass shooting in Las Vegas, keeping it fresh in our minds and making it even clearer that we easily forget what has happened.

But then Stephen Colbert comes along with a response like this and gives a take that is similar to what we’ve heard before, especially in late night thanks to Jimmy Kimmel’s response to Las Vegas, but there is also a tone that sets this apart. Colbert isn’t holding much back at this point, almost reaching a point where he feels like he need to try to effect change where others are failing to do so:

“Doing nothing, as I’ve said before, is unacceptable, but it’s unnatural, it’s inhuman. It just goes against our nature. It just goes against our nature. We want to fix things. You want to respond to something terrible like this, not just now but at anytime in human history…

“So what do you do? If you’re not going to be hopeless but you feel powerless, how do you get the power back?”

Using some choice comparisons to the talking points around the gun debate, including how getting eating by tigers is just part of being free, Colbert pinpoints the only real solution he can think of: get out and vote in 2018. If you want to put people in who will take action on gun control, even at the most limited of levels, The Late Show host says you need to vote to put those people in office. The people who currently make the decisions in Washington, D.C. have shown where they stand on the situation and if you disagree, that’s the only true way to change it.

(Via The Late Show)