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.”
Then why isn’t London full of homemade guns? If it’s not the availability of guns, then what is the reason the US has so many shootings?
London does have homemade guns. I wouldn’t say it’s full of them, of course, but they are there and they are a problem sometimes.
Availability of guns is obviously increased by the laws being such that large scale manufacturers can make and sell, as in the US. But it’s hard to disentangle America’s gun culture, gun availability, and its laws. America has so many more guns than the UK in large part because the gun played such a bigger role in US culture historically, you know, violent revolution for independence and settling the Western frontier and all that. Then once there are lots of guns more people need guns to defend themselves, and so on. That was all allowed by the laws. The culture perpetuates the laws, the laws perpetuate the culture, etc.
We had a shooting with homemade guns in Halle in germany in 2019. A nazi assaultet a synagoge. But his weapons were shit and he couldn’t kill anyone in the synagoge. So he shot random people on the street, killing two. If he had acess to reliable firearms the death toll would be much higher.
