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.”

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Everyone talks about assault weapons and mad shootings and ignores the vast majority of gun homicides.

    All types of rifles combined make up 3% of homicides, and just about 1% of firearm deaths (handgun suicides are about 2/3rd of gun deaths).

    That’s the reason the Dems didn’t really care when the AWB expired in the 2000s. Every single objective study of homicide rates, gun murder rates, and mass shootings showed no statically-significant impact of the AWB.

    The real danger was easy, cheap access to handguns. A $1000 rifle that’s hard to conceal isn’t nearly as dangerous as a $200 handgun that can hold just as much ammunition and be easily concealed.

    But after DC v Heller, it became clear that handgun ban wasn’t going to be possible, so the focus switched back to black rifles.

    We have a lot of broken gun laws in this country, but I’m much more concerned with cheap zinc handguns designed to be disposable than I am an AR-15.