After attacking the media for their "anti-gun agenda" and Slate Magazine for keeping a running tally of the number of people who have been killed by firearms since the Newtown massacre, Stephen Colbert opined over the fact that all of this anti-gun information has had an affect, with 93 percent of Americans now favoring background checks for all gun buyers.
"Luckily," Colbert noted, "we can fight this negative reporting about guns." He elaborated during his Word segment this Monday evening.
COLBERT: Folks, this isn't the first time our Second Amendment rights have been threatened by facts. Back in 1993, the jackbooted statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control published a study of guns in households. Now, according to the study, not only were guns ineffective in home protection, but “people who keep guns in their homes appear to be at greater risk of homicide... than people who do not.”
Well sure, with a gun in the house, my family is less safe, but isn't that a small price to pay for my family's safety? [...] Folks, think about it. If this kind of information fell into the wrong hands, who knows how much damage it could have done, but luckily the NRA stepped up to make sure it would never happen again.
(You can read more on that here: What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding.)
Colbert was terribly upset that the NRA's efforts are now being undone by President Obama, who signed an executive order which lifted the ban on the research, although it's not clear where they'll get funding for that.
After again lamenting the United States facing the "threat of information," Colbert heaped praise on "patriots like conservative historian" David Barton for "fighting back with positive stories about guns in our schools."
COLBERT: Yeah, real simple stuff. Remember kids, remember... guns are like gum. You have to bring enough for the entire class.
After slamming blogs for pointing out that Barton probably lifted his story from the Louis L'Amour Novel Bendigo Shafter, Colbert glossed over Barton's nonsense by noting that "even if Barton did borrow the story, there's nothing wrong with taking a story from a book and saying it's real," since it works for religion.
Colbert got another shot in on the NRA's LaPierre once more in Barton's defense:
COLBERT: The fact is, the only thing... the only thing out there... the only thing that can stop a bad guy with good information is a good guy with bad information, like NRA President Wayne LaPierre. [...] So folks, to counter all of the negative stories about guns out there, we've got to follow Wayne and David's lead and make up positive stories about guns. For instance, did you know that four out of five dentists recommend that you own a gun?
Or that Abraham Lincoln actually died from choking on a Raisinet? So join me in standing up against any actual knowledge about guns. Let the CDC know, they can take our ignorance when they pry it from our cold dead minds. And that's The Word.
