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.”
I wasn’t making an argument, I was making a joke. I was imagining a fictional character believing that illegal things magically can’t happen, and murder does happen so it must be legal, so the obvious solution would be to make it illegal so it would stop happening.
Ah, okay.
I was inclined to think you were serious because, believe it or not, it’s an argument I’ve heard before. Apart from random people trying to futz through an argument, Ben Shapiro complained that Democrats, when asked what they’d ban, didn’t say “crime.”
I should add in seriousness, I do think it’s important to recognize that laws don’t magically make things go away. Sometimes things are very hard to eliminate, and sometimes prohibition of something actually makes it worse like with the Drug War. But like you said about murder, we don’t say, “murder bans didn’t actually eliminate murder, therefore we might as well get rid of them.”