Just When Is It Time?

Savor a second this statement from the Wall Street Journal on the shootings in Connecticut.

As happened after the shootings at Columbine High School, where two students shot 12 other students, there will be calls for the control of guns, notwithstanding the existence of 200 million guns amid a U.S. population of 311 million. Last year in Norway, a nation with a tight gun-control and licensing regime, Anders Breivik methodically gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers, on the island of Utoya. [...]

There is time enough for that public debate and all the usual intellectual tensions put in motion by such discussion. But not at this moment. Newtown's massacre is a crushing event. The emotions pouring now from every person in the United States toward those families are the right ones. It is better to let them run for awhile.

There is time enough for . . . public debate and all the usual intellectual tensions put in motion by such discussion? What everybody should do now in the face of this unspeakable evil is what? Let our emotions run! Just be sad all over. Are you f--king kidding me? Can it get more craven than this, this pious concern for straight thinking? What's the WSJ saying? That we cannot think straight right now because we're all too overwrought by having some loon with a semi-automatic weapon blow 20 first-graders away? That this horrifying crime has gotten us too upset to be rational? That the best thing is we all avoid the intellectual tensions that come with debating whether a civilized society should all virtually untrammeled access to weapons designed to kill human beings? Access to purchase guns at gun shows to anybody from sociopaths to psychotics? We're not going to think straight about this is until we've wept enough about this Newtown catastrophe?

Just think about the crass manipulation involved right here. The WSJ knows what history shows: that the further we get from this event, the more likely the NRA and its 2nd Amendment freak show will prevail on our spineless lawmakers to do nothing. The best time to do something about keeping this sort of horror from happening again is right now.