If we're talking about increasing gun safety through numbers reduction, the most effective words in the English language will be "Ewww," "So 2011," and "Jesus, what a pain in the ass."

Megan McCardle provided a prime example, as linked to by Michael, of one particular take on what transpired in Newtown as well as other mass shooting that tends to get in my craw [emphasis mine]:

Most crimes are motivated by unlovely impulses that are at least comprehensible: the desire for money, sex, respect, revenge.  We don't do these things...But we can understand why people want to--we know what someone is after when they hold up a liquor store, or even kills their spouse for the insurance money.  Understanding is not sanction: these crimes still have the power to anger and horrify.  But they're comprehensible, and that comprehensibility is surprisingly comforting.  

The alternative is Newtown.  When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end....Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold.

Since we can't understand it, we can't change it.  And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in.

As reports thicken of a possible deal between the White House and the House Republicans – a deal which will supposedly avoid the rest of us going over some fiscal cliff on January 1 – it is worth remembering at least four reasons why such a deal is probably best avoided,[2] and why cliff jumping (bungee[3] or otherwise) is completely unnecessary. Four reasons that take us from the current intransigence of the contemporary Republican Party back to the nineteenth-century origins of so much of that intransigence.

Hello all....

I've taken down my posts recently. I tried to get away from this website and this discussion but -- I can't.

Reading some of the comments that I got which obviously misunderstood what I was saying made me at once sad that my attempts to articulate what I think is causing this horror were being misunderstood. I got paid to talk about public issues for several years but I found it really upsetting when I was getting comments basically accusing me of nonsense. It is much easier to stomach criticism and grow a thick skin when you are talking about institutional racism or economic policy than when you are trying to articulate the cause of mass murder. I especially felt uncomfortable with the fact that I was writing may be hurting or offending people.

John Lott

THE EVIL

Guns, guns, and more guns

Babes in the garden are gone

Eden's been attacked!

I can't stop cryin'

Five year-olds are just dyin'

Before our own eyes.

There is no bizness

Like show bizness on cable

Now cliches abound

Children have been wronged

Families are in mourning

Is there a morrow?

http://dagblog.com/arts/tear-stained-friday-afternoon-haikulodeon-15661

She did not die of cancer or a heart attack or a stroke. She did not have diabetes or any other disease. Some high BP but that is all. And she did not die of natural causes.

NO she died from the most likely cause these days after entering a hospital. She died of a hospital acquired infection.