Home is Where the Heart Is
Can a good guy with a gun stop a bad guy with a gun? How about a few thousand good guys? Entire communities in Maine are still in lockdown. Hundreds of police officers are searching for the well-armed madman who killed at least 18 people in Lewiston. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is involved. So is the FBI. So is the Coast Guard. So are SWAT teams. So are state police officers and highway patrolmen from multiple states. There are drones, helicopters, military vehicles, and helmeted law enforcement officials in body armor. The White House is being kept abreast as the situation unfolds. How can this many people be risking their lives to stop a lone gunman? Because, we have fully legal weapons that can turn a single person into a one-man army. There are now reports of a suicide note. Maybe the bad guy with a gun killed the bad guy with a gun. Here’s the latest on the manhunt.
+ Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine changed his views on assault weapons this week. “I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war, like the assault rifle used to carry out this crime. The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure. Which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown of Lewiston, Maine.” It was someone’s hometown last time. It will be someone else’s hometown next time.
+ “Today, as my wife and I stay locked in our home—the gunman, still on the loose, is the subject of a sprawling manhunt—I am filled with nothing so much as rage. Rage at my gun-nut friends from home who will see this tragedy as a reason for less gun control, rather than more of it. Rage at every conservative pundit who has ever uttered the phrase ‘good guy with a gun.’ Rage at the state of Maine, which has some of the most lax gun laws in the country. Rage at the politicians here and beyond who have refused to solve a problem for which solutions readily exist. Rage at myself for being so blind.” Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic: I saw the gun-violence epidemic—and my relationship to it as a gun owner—as an abstraction. Then a mass shooting happened in the little city where I work.
+ Can we count on Congress to finally do something, even something insignificant or performative, this time? I’ll let this quote from new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson answer that question. “At the end of the day the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns.” (At the end of the day, the problem is that the human heart isn’t bulletproof.)