The suspect is believed to be Robert Card, a 20-year US Army veteran from Bowdoin Center, Maine.
(according to Telegrams so take with grain of salt)
EDIT: Name confirmed by news.
According to law enforcement, CARD recently reported mental health issues to include hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
The way I see it, the ship sailed on preventing mass shootings in the US with either Sandy Hook or Columbine. The shock of children being butchered gave way to The Discourse ™ and now a large proportion of the population just accept shootings as a fact of life like car crashes.
Add to that the sheer number of guns in the US, as well as the gun-related brain rot in the general population, you’d need a campaign of concerted government action that would make the war against drugs look like child’s play.
The American obsession with guns goes deep, all the way to the very conception of being American. The country was founded on a settler colonial fantasy of exploring a new (to Europe) frontier, and the actual settlers had to be quite self-reliant, often living in very remote areas in challenging climes. On top of the settler-colonialism, there grew a strong identity of self reliance and rejection/independence of society. I think some early American settlers were really self-reliant, having acquired their own means of production and in fact not needing to interact much with society. Of course, the majority of Americans were urbanites from the beginning. Yet, the idea of the frontier was always prominently in mind and cited proudly by all Americans regardless of their actual lifestyle.
I will gloss over a lot of American history and simply state that augmenting the national military with state militias made sense both before and after the American Revolution, so it is not surprising that a limit was put in place (the 2nd amendment) to prevent the federal government from monopolizing access to guns. But this was in large part a consideration of the rights of state governments vis-a-vis the federal government, in terms of their own established militias which already existed, not necessarily for random joes to open-carry in their local Walmart.
That is some historical context for the early link between gun ownership and American patriotism … the question remains, why has it stuck around even to the modern day, when the vast majority of Americans were born here and live in urban cities far away from any “frontier”?
I think that question is the one most people, especially non-Americans focus on. Clearly it is the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the US military/Hollywood, and in recent decades, the Republican Party and NRA. They have morphed the existing frontier mindset into something somewhat new and more abstract, a generic anti-authoritarianism in which the gun owner no longer defends against a specific foe like nature or “savages” or the British, but organized society in general, which they blame for eliminating the Wild West which they so desperately wish still existed in order to live out their settler-colonial fantasy. (See also: Westworld)
Didn’t expect to write this much, but my point is basically that it will take a lot more than solving material conditions of poverty to eliminate the backward gun culture in America. Like @Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net said, it’ll take a concerted re-education effort to undo decades or centuries of propaganda about American culture itself and what it is to be American.
I agree completely. Just compare america’s reaction to continuous mass shootings to that of Canada or Australia. The massacres at Ecole Polytechnique and Port Stanley led to sweeping changes in gun legislation in both countries, while Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, etc have led to basically nothing being done to curb the endless stream of mass shooters. Now I’ll leave discussion about firearm legislation for another time, but I can’t help but think a basic screening system along with mandatory firearm safety training if someone wants to own firearms goes a long way to reducing gun violence. Of course there are issues with how that sort of thing is implemented and who ends up being approved ( exacerbating the whole situation and leading to even more mass shootings
There were no initial signs of terrorism.
The not-terrorism/terrorism scale really is . The article was mentioning that this one event is close to being over the total number of murders in the state for all of 2022.
Dudes twitter was shared on reddit, of course he was a Republican and also a transphobe. But then i refreshed and the account was “suspended.”
https://twitter.com/RobertC20041800/with_replies?t=F8McyP5jkWQqNIzeeIVFzQ&s=09
totally no motive at all.
although one tweet he liked was one from Ravens QB Lamar Jackson about mental health awareness. so much for that.
Second comment in the thread is saying it’s usually crazy Trans people doing the shooting and none of those likes have anything to do with him being the shooter.
R/stormfront just grooving
I find it hard to understand how someone can shoot about 100 people but police still haven’t been to catch him yet. Maybe the vast emptiness of the suburban hellscape that makes it possible.
Having lived in Lewiston a long time, I can tell you the cops there are all totally incompetent. They’re not even murderous psychos that big city police forces hire. Just total dumbasses riding around eating donuts 50 hours a week. The police station is like a five minute drive from where this guy started shooting.
If you drive twenty minutes in any direction it’s all woods and camps though. A helicopter can’t do shit, there’s no surveillance cameras, and very few people to call in tips.
