Left-wing HBO host John Oliver has dismissed calls for sending more police into schools following the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, saying that the solution is more gun control.
In Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver launched an anti-police rant and cited a study claiming that a police presence in schools could even motivate shooters to come more heavily armed.
“If school cops can make shootings worse, why then are we still pitching them as a solution?” he said. “If Off! discovered that their mosquito repellant attracted mosquitoes, they’d stop selling it, or at the very least rebrand it as a cologne for lonely mosquito bachelors.”
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John Oliver cited an ACLU study saying that cops have a largely negative impact on schools and students because they can arrest students for things like physical assault. “Kids with criminal records can have a much harder time getting jobs, scholarships” and other benefits, he said.
The British comedian concluded: “School police are not the answer to school shootings,” and that the “answer to that is gun control.”
CHANDAN KHANNA; Sarah L. Voisin/Getty Images
On Sunday, Oliver mocked the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre for suggesting more funding for the police in schools and the addition of security resources officer programs.
“I guess it’s not that surprising that the solution from the CEO of the NRA is more people with guns,” Oliver said. “It’d be like hearing ‘the garbage dump is overflowing, so we need more piles of garbage’ from the head of the National Raccoon Association. I mean, what else do you really expect him to say?”
The comedian also made fun of ballistic blankets, or bullet proof blankets, in schools.
“What are you talking about?!” Oliver said. “Use a blanket is not a strategy for stopping deaths during a school shooting. It’s barely a strategy for ‘a bird got in the house.’”
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