More than 24 hours after gunfire erupted during the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade on Wednesday—killing one person and injuring at least 22 others—we still know very little about exactly what led to the tragic events or who is responsible for them. “The good news is we do know one of the heroes that helped stopped the shooting,” said The Daily Show correspondent/this week’s guest host Jordan Klepper on Thursday.
“It wasn’t a good guy with a gun,” Klepper continued. “It wasn’t anybody bearing arms. It was just a guy with arms.”
That man, Chiefs fan Paul Contreras, was at the parade with his three daughters with the plan to celebrate with the rest of his city. But when the shooting began and Contreras found himself within spitting distance of the alleged gunman, he did what he could—and tackled the suspect.
Contreras’s daughter captured her father’s heroics on video with her cellphone, footage which has now gone viral. And Klepper was certainly impressed—“Not just for stopping the shooter, but for executing a flawless tackle in front of the Super Bowl champions.”
Klepper has seen enough tragedies like the one in Kansas City—he even debunked the “good guy with a gun” argument—over the past decade to know that no amount of police presence is enough to prevent the same thing from happening again.
“There were more than 800 police officers there, and all they could do was react after it happened,” said Klepper, who then attempted to appeal to The Daily Show’s viewers by putting his own argument for why gun control is necessary into football terms:
“America needs a defensive strategy that will stop a guy from getting the ball in the first place. Not just hope someone tackles him before he gets to the end zone. That’s not a winning strategy—unless you’re playing the Jets.”
Klepper took the analogy even further when he stated that “we need to limit the size of the ball. That ball is a weapon of war; the Founders didn’t anticipate the ball would be this big; I’m in too deep with this metaphor. I hear it now. You get the idea.”
Yet even in the wake of America’s deadliest mass shootings, Republicans and Democrats have never been able to come together and talk about firearms regulation in any meaningful way, which is the part that Klepper says infuriates him the most. Because we’re not “going to get to have an honest conversation about America’s gun problem. Instead, we’ll be having a conversation about America’s parade problem.”
As for all the media coverage that has angled the story in the same way—a day of celebration marred by gunfire—Klepper has just one (rhetorical) question: “Shouldn’t every day be able to end without a mass shooting? Is our bar really that low? Even my shittiest day—my wife leaves me, the IRS audits me, I go to see Madame Web—even that day deserves to end without a shooting.”
