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John Oliver praises Florida kids for gun control efforts

WATCH: John Oliver praises Florida high school students for gun control efforts – Feb 20, 2018

WARNING: This story contains explicit language. 

John Oliver applauded the students of Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for their efforts in the gun control debate on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight.

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“These [school shooting] events are so familiar, you now automatically know how each side will play out: ‘Thoughts and prayers,’ ‘F**k your thoughts and prayers,’ ‘It’s a mental health problem,’ ‘Yeah, but it’s also a gun problem’ and then someone says ‘Now’s not the time to talk about gun control,’ and everyone moves on until it inevitably happens again,” Oliver said on Last Week Tonight about the shootings at the south Florida high school that left 17 dead last Wednesday.

“But this time felt slightly different, because when the ‘Now’s not the time’ argument came out, the kids from that school said, ‘You know what? Yes, it f**king is,'” Oliver said.

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Last Week Tonight then played clips of Marjory Stoneman Douglas students, including Emma Gonzalez’s powerful speech at an anti-gun rally where she referred to those preventing stricter gun laws as “BS.”

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“It is a little ironic that the people acting with the most maturity in this horrifying situation aren’t even old enough to say the word ‘bulls**t’ in front of their parents,” Oliver said.

“Those kids already have announced a march next month and, in doing so, challenge adults to participate in a real conversation about gun violence,” Oliver applauded, adding, “But, they will be up against it.”

READ MORE: Students caught in the Florida school shooting chronicled their trauma on social media

As evidence, Oliver played a CNN clip in which Andre Bauer was asked if Republicans would take notice of these kids’ concerns. Bauer began to say:

“We have a cultural thing here that we are not discussing,” he said. “When I grew up, it was Andy Griffith, you never had school shootings, we still had prayer in school, and we drove to school with guns in the car,” he insisted, saying we live in a “different time,” and pointing his finger at “the movie industry, the rap industry, radio in general” for “desensitized it,” adding, “Now we have kids eating Tide pods instead of discipline.”

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In response, Oliver said: “I call BS on that,” saying there are “so many things wrong with that, from the rap industry to the Tide pods. To the fact that, that man was born in 1969. A year after The Andy Griffith Show went off the air.”

Watch part of the Last Week Tonight clip in the video above.

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