Emotions are still raw from Friday’s shooting in Sandy Hook. We want explanations. That’s natural. The media and legal system will examine Adam Lanza’s history and mental health in detail in the coming weeks, but in the final accounting, those answers may be inconclusive and unsatisfying.
Certainly none will come from politicians who jumped into the fray to capitalize on this. Less than an hour after the first reports, the Brady Campaign sent out a press release calling for new legislation. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer spoke of it “finally being time” and of this incident serving as a “tipping point” before we even knew the exact name of the shooter or what weapons he’d actually used.
The “conversation” we keep hearing the pundits bandy about on the evening news isn’t any such thing. It’s a set of canned talking points and legislative proposals that predated this massacre. The new laws being pushed are the same old laws that get reintroduced every year. Continued...