On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locations—a bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.

While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.

“Now, we know the arguments,” Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    That statement came across as the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument that is used against gun control, saying that it makes no sense to restrict guns when it’s the person using the gun who decides to kill, and if that person is motivated enough they can do damage even without access to firearms, so why bother?

    I don’t think that’s your point at all, but people always reflexively downvote over shit like that.