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.”
“Assault weapons”? Lol. The problem here is that, as far as mass shootings go, rifles are still in the minority, eclipsed by handguns. If we were to accept such emotional knee-jerk reaction as somehow sufficient for legislative change, and we haven’t, you should be focusing on handguns.
“Fix” is a good word… If we’re going to consider the process of problem solving, one needs to separate underlying problems from symptoms. Focusing on the particular tool used to affect a given result would be focusing on symptoms - trying to address this doesn’t address that people have, for one reason or another, opted to commit what are effectively violent suicides, it instead quibbles about the firearm used. There is an incredible commonality between mass shooters which clearly highlights the various pressures, motivations, and other factors contributing to their decision to commit such violent vengeful suicides - in other words, a clear highlight of the actual problems.
Were we to invest here the same effort we invest in circle jerking about rifles, putting forth partisan legislation, etc. we may have actually made a difference by now - reducing the count of mass shooting victims buy the simple expedient of doing away with the reasons people decide to do these things and providing the de-escalation and appropriate intervention just in case… While managing to also actually improve the lives of the people who would have become mass shooters but didn’t.
You may have given up hope because of lack of legislation regarding rifles, but I’ve given up hope because of the general inability population to see far enough behind partisan polarization and propaganda to actually analyze and attempt to address issues.