Samantha Bee on Alt-Right Mass Shooters: “Being Angry and Hateful Is Not a Mental Illness”

Here’s a clip from last night’s Full Frontal, where Samantha Bee shines a light on one huge aspect of the debate about guns, specifically Trump and the GOP’s decision to react to the Parkland shooting by blaming it on mental illness. “Most mass murderers aren’t mentally ill – only about 22% of them are. That means the other 78% are just hateful assholes,” she says. In fact, the Florida gunman had a history of posting bigoted statements against Jewish people, black people, and immigrants on Instagram and elsewhere, but for some reason, that’s not enough to start taking the very real problem of “alt-right” killers and the online communities where they’re radicalized seriously. “Before an alt-right shooter starts mass shooting, he’s just an angry white man who hates women and people of color, and being angry and hateful is not a mental illness. In fact, some days, it feels like it’s as American as apple pie.”

Check out another clip from the episode below, where Bee breaks down why the NRA is essentially a cult – an argument she makes by comparing it with another famous cult, Scientology: “Both of these cults are based on fanciful myths that, when repeated enough, their otherwise intelligent followers start to believe. One says that 75 million years ago an intergalactic warlord nuked billions of people in volcanoes, and then there’s the really crazy myth that guns have nothing to do with gun violence.”