Colbert Rips New Speaker’s Pathetic Maine Shooting Response
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.”
Gun laws, yes. Gun deaths, not as much The US does have a lot, I won't argue with that, but I would not say it's unique.
Gun crimes are committed by a very small portion of gun owners, so the statistics aren't so simple. It's like minnows and whales in sales. The issue is that if someone wanting to commit a crime is choosing not to because they worry their victim might turn out to have a gun and shoot them in defense, and then you remove that deterrent you end up with more crime. The number of guns randomly distributed would seem to correlate with increased violence and crime, but the distribution matters a lot. If you double the number of guns but somehow limited them only to the least criminal and most responsible, you'd probably actually decrease crime despite the number of guns going up. So whether a 90% decrease amongst good gun owners with 10% decrease amongst bad gun owners is actually a net positive, I'm honestly not sure.
I'll put it this way, there's never been a mass shooting where I live. Not one in my entire life. There's only been a handful of people who've died to guns at all, and all of those people were killed by armed police officers.
The stats speak for themselves. Each bad gun owner can mass murder 20-30 people if they so choose. And if you're gonna commit a mass shooting I don't reckon you really give a shit if someone else there has a gun. Probably pretty laissez-faire about living at all if you're willing to mow down as many people as you possibly can. That doesn't happen here. That is a product of your country that continues to happen over and over again.
I do live in the US, and there's never been a mass shooting where I live, either. The US is a very large place. Things vary quite a bit from place to place. A shooting totally could happen near me, I'm just saying the size of the US and its large population does make them look like a more common thing than they actually are sometimes.
I agree that public indiscriminate mass shooters probably are not deterred by the thought of someone else having a gun and shooting them to stop them. In fact that may be what they want a lot of times. Public mass shootings are a very small portion of gun deaths, though, even in the US. There are some lists of shootings that include things that don't really belong. Gang violence is the one most often cited, if 3 people from one gang and 2 from another shoot at each other over a dispute, that's technically a mass shooting by many definitions, even though its not really contributing to anyone else's safety.
I'm not sure that's the best site to use for support.
The Crime Prevention Research Center is a nonprofit founded in 2013 by John Lott, author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime.” He is best known as an advocate in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns.
I checked an npr article about the subject and we seem pretty bad...but far from the worst. Should do better. Could be far worse.
It doesn't seem like the FEE article citing CPRC and the NPR article disagree very much. But it's true that some people will trust the NPR one much more, so that's valuable.
Edit: I mean, the numbers in the articles aren't necessarily the same, but the idea that the US could be better and could be worse is present in both.