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.”
The Maine shooter received urgent mental healthcare. Then he killed 20 people with a legally purchased firearm.
If you genuinely believe that “universal healthcare with no waiting times, for free, to every man, woman and child in America, including people who don’t want help, that instantly cures them of complex mental health problems far beyond our current medical science and so completely they will never relapse for even a minute, all so we can indiscriminately sell them guns” is a reasonable position, by all means start building that system.
You can have your guns back when you’re done.