Responding Rationally to a Tragedy

The propagandists are demonstrably responding to this tragedy with more propaganda. The people of this nation got sufficiently upset with the jackbooted authoritarianism approach in 1994 that they elected a Republican Congress to stop it, among other things. The lesson that gun control equals lots of politicians spending more time with their families sunk in pretty well after Al Gore's loss in 2000 (it was one of many things, that if any one of which had not been an issue he would have won on Clinton's record).

It wasn't till Obama had "more flexibility" after his last election that the gun grabbers made another major push at the national level, and abjectly failed. How much they'll pay for that we'll find out starting in November (various Senators like Manchin won't come up for election for another 2 or in his case 4 years, I guess he supposed we'll have forgotten by then).

(Note this is largely, but by no means entirely a partisan issue; almost no one in the national Republican party cares about the issue, and at the Federal level we've seen very little relief, the real action is state and local, including elections for Federal offices in them. And it's not a litmus issue like e.g. abortion, there are at least a few very anti-gun national level Republicans like Pete King.)

Anyway, the politicians are most certainly acting rationally. Those in completely safe seats like Diane Feinstein are all for gun control, the national security state, etc. Those that aren't have a much stronger tendency to listen to their constituents. Entirely rational responses.

Also, why shouldn't we respond rationally? Besides the total lack of evidence that gun control works, these atrocities mostly happen in gun free zones (all of the really big ones have, except for the Arizona Congresswoman's shooting), e.g. this happened in Santa Barbara County, where the Sheriff issues very few concealed carry licenses, and the state in its infinite wisdom banned (unloaded) open carry. There's one obvious answer there, one that almost all the nation's states have adopted, and with judicial action, we may see 90% of Americans enjoying a right to carry concealed (Illinois now, California and Hawaii someday, maybe).

Another is to get serious again about mental health. It's also no accident that these atrocities are committed by the seriously mentally ill, but for a bunch of reasons we almost always don't do anything about them until they commit crimes.