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.”
How it went is Australia (trust me, we had shitloads of guns, buddy) was, people who wanted to hand in the small selection of banned guns, did, the people who didn’t, didn’t. Then regularly the cops do an amnesty day, where you can hand in any illegal guns, no questions asked. If they change their minds. People still own guns. You don’t ban them all, just the unnecessary ones, and you regulate who can buy them, kinda like getting a really easy drivers licence.