Jimmy Kimmel got about two words into his monologue before he started crying.

In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history over the weekend in Las Vegas, Kimmel and his late-night colleagues were faced with the unenviable task of telling jokes in the hours after a horrific crime. For a while, Kimmel didn’t even try. Instead, he gave a passionate plea to the President, Congress, and to ordinary Americans, to try to do something to stem the tide of these mass shootings which are becoming more and more prevalent and which, we are endlessly told, can’t be stopped.

You can call Kimmel an elitist media type if you want, and I’m sure some will. (This is the internet, and it is almost entirely horrible these days.) But if you’ve followed Kimmel’s career, you know he’s not a political guy by nature. This is the man whose breakthrough gig on television was co-hosting a show whose primary selling point was slow-motion video of scantily clad women jumping on trampolines. And around the same time he co-hosted a game show starring conservative commentator and actor Ben Stein. He’s not a firebrand. He’s just a guy whose job forces him to look at the news every day and joke about it. Clearly that job is taking a serious toll on his psyche and his soul.

He’s also a guy who hails from Las Vegas, the site of this terrible and senseless tragedy. This monologue comes straight from his heart. I hope people listen.

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