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.”
The corollary to your statement is that if we take guns away from people with mental illness, we are removing their ability to overthrow the government. This is a bad thing from the conservative mindset…
We want people to overthrow and kill people who are in the government, right? Right??
I know you’re playing devil’s advocate, but I’d point out that I don’t want to take away guns from people with mental illness, I want to temporarily confiscate them from people who are suicidal and homicidal until they receive proper treatment and stabilize.
After all, if they commit suicide, they won’t be very helpful for your (conservatives) ability to overthrow the government. They need to be alive, no?