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.”
So you’re ok with taking guns away from mentally unstable people? Ok, good, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s go one step further and require yearly mental health check ups for gun ownership.
Definitely one way of trying to . One question though, who’s going to pay for all that?
The mental health services are not going to be free and the gun owners certainly won’t be cool with paying it. The government definitely won’t pay for it…See, this is why I say I have no faith that the problem won’t be solved any time soon, if ever.
Too many hard and expensive choices to make that will prove massively unpopular with large parts of either side of the argument.
The gun lobby could pay for it! They’ve got 16 million a year to spare!
Too expensive! Says residents of the only developed nation where this is a regular occurance
Why would they go against their own self interests?