He was on fire last night. Stephen Colbert called the shooting “horrible and familiar, and horrible because it is so familiar,” noting that the tragedy was “the 130th mass shooting of 2023, and 2023 is only 87 days old.” Via the New York Times:
Not doing anything about this is an insane dereliction of our collective humanity. And the obvious solution here is one President Biden has proposed: an assault weapons ban. We’ve had one before, from 1994 to 2004 — and it worked. During that ban, the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower than it is today. That just makes sense. Fewer guns equals fewer shootings.”
“It’s not complicated. It might be hard, but it’s not complicated. That’s just math. It’s the same reason these days we have fewer strangulations with a landline.”
He reserved some of his harshest words for Tim Burchett, the winger who responded with this:
“ 'It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘If somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”
“Yes, I suppose as a lawmaker, he could, I don’t know, make a law, but that sounds like a lot of work. Despair — despair is so much more efficient. It reminds me of that sign on the subway: ‘If you see something, whatevs. Bombers gonna bomb.’”
