The reality, though is both sides are politicizing the tragedy — supporters of gun control by, well, supporting gun control, and opponents of gun control are trying to keep the status quo by getting people to stop talking about guns.
That’s actually fine. Politics is how laws are made, and mass shootings are events that better laws and policies can help prevent. So we should expect the political process to establish an environment where mass shootings won’t happen again or, at least, don’t happen as often. [...]
So we know the federal government could take steps to reduce gun violence, including some mass shootings. We know the political system was set up to solve these kinds of crises that affect broad segments of the population — it is literally the point of government. So why wouldn’t it be okay for the government and the politicians who lead it to try to act? [...]
This is so common that gun control advocates predict it every single time a shooting happens and gets lots of media attention. After his daughter Alison Parker was killed in the shooting of two Virginia journalists in August 2015, Andy Parker said, “Next week, it isn’t going to be a story anymore, and everybody’s gonna forget it.” That is exactly what happened — within weeks, the public had moved on, and the Virginia shooting was no longer in the news, overwhelmed by stories about a Kentucky clerk and Europe’s refugee crisis. No national talk of gun control happened again until the Oregon shooting in October — which again was only discussed for a couple weeks.
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