In the reaction to this shooting, we see the usual Democratic cry for gun control and the Republican cry that Democrats are trying to "politicize" the event to promote....gun control.
There's a strange mix in our politics. The gun nuts, on one hand, look to the carrying of guns as some kind of brave, hard macho thing. On the other hand, they claim they need to carry them because they are afraid. When we see some idiot kill someone who, say, threw popcorn at them at a movie, or who got out a cell phone, or who told the idiot to fuck off when the idiot told him the music was too loud, the universal defense in court is always that the idiot feared for his life. The weird American mix. But then, in our society at least, we reserve the right to be bound by our emotions and to interpret the world in terms of them as much as we wish. The irony is, there's nothing whatsoever "conservative" about this.
