“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.”

  • LavaPlanet@lemmy.world
    11·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Jeremy [Iowa]English
      1·
      11 months ago

      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

      Yeah, let’s discuss this.

      What was Australia’s peak firearm ownership per capita? How many firearms owned by how many citizens?

      Of those, what types of firearms were those made up of? How many were semi-automatic rifles or handguns?

      How much money would be required to have bought them all out at fair price in Australia? Now, how about for the US?

      I suspect your trust me lmao indicates a poor understanding of the differences between the relevant statuses of the two.

      People still own guns.

      Mm hmm. What types of firearms do they own?

      Are there no restrictions at all?

      You don’t ban them all, just the unnecessary ones

      Ah, so there’s an arbitrary delineation of necessity and there are, in fact, bans? Interesting.

      you regulate who can buy them, kinda like getting a really easy drivers licence.

      Fortunately, we already have this courtesy of the various disqualifiers from purchase.

      Assuming we’re all talking about those legal firearms, anyway.