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.”
And that’s the other edge of the double edged sword. If you say, “people with known mental health problems lose certain rights, even temporarily,” some portion of people with those problems will just fight harder to keep them unknown, foregoing help in the process. It’s just like how when certain places pass laws prohibiting having sex when you know you have an STD, some people just stop getting checked so they don’t “know” they have an STD.
There’s basically nothing temporary to government. You generally have to fight to undo anything, even if the laws says it should.