“Goddamn, these kids are not messing around.”
That was the message from “The Daily Show’s” Trevor Noah Tuesday night as he and other late-night hosts weighed in on survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting turning their grief into activism.
Noah, Stephen Colbert and Jordan Klepper focused on the youths from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who are calling for stricter gun control.
On “The Late Show,” Colbert said he was “sickened and heartbroken” by the attack.
He said he worried about possible inaction by lawmakers but applauded the students.
“There is one group that does give me hope that we can do something to protect the children, and sadly, it’s the children,” Colbert said before leading a round of applause for the students. “These students saw their leaders doing nothing and said ‘Hold my root beer.'”
He called the students “inspiring” for organizing a series of school walkouts, a march on the Florida state capitol and the upcoming March For Our Lives rally planned for Washington, D.C., on March 24.
“I hope these kids don’t give up because this is their lives, and their future,” Colbert said. “Someone else may be in power, but this country belongs to them. And there is reason for hope.”
Noah joked that it would have been the same old story after the shooting were it not for “those meddling kids.”
“This also just goes to show how upside-down everything becomes when guns are involved,” Noah said after showing a reel of media coverage about the students calling for stricter gun-control laws. “Right now, kids are acting like adults and adults are acting like children.”
On Comedy Central’s “The Opposition,” Klepper welcomed Marjory Stoneman Douglas students Delaney Tarr and Carly Novell.
The seniors talked about their mission, which Tarr said is not to take away the civil liberties of law-abiding gun owners.
“Our goal is of course to let our younger siblings, to let our cousins, to let the children that we know in our lives be able to go to school without having their school shot up,” Tarr said. “Ultimately that is our goal, to make the world safer, to make our country safer, because this is an American issue and we’ve seen … other legislation being passed through in other countries and it has worked.”
