“More than 80 percent of Americans want Congress to do something—anything—to prevent mass shootings,” Colbert said.

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.”

  • pyrflie@lemm.ee
    75·
    8 months ago

    People have already lost their lives over ATF enforcement. Ruby Ridge was literally about the topic at hand and served as a rallying point for the type of opposition I outlined. If you don’t think that a seizure will result in widespread deaths you are burying your head in the sand.

    As to the other point there are 100s of thousands of unregistered guns, and gun manufacture is easier than ever thanks to 3d printers, cheap CNC mills, and FOSS software. I’ve looked into it in 2012 and it would only cost about 6k to setup a system that could turn out an AR15 every 14 days (Barrels were the bitch). It’s probably more expensive now, but it’s still really low cost compared to potential profits on a black market. Ironically primers are probably the best control point here as they are a bitch to safely make, but if you have a sufficiently talented chemist to manufacture smokeless gunpowder then even this is just inflating marketeer rates.

    I get that you are emotional about preventing the tragedies in question, but if you don’t think about implementation you wont get anywhere. It’s why I’ve been looking at it.