The Medium Is the Motive; Right to bear arms isn’t only freedom implicated in massacres like last week’s.

James Taranto @ The WSJ:

If hypocrisy were an intoxicating spirit, Andrew Rosenthal would be a master distiller. On Friday, we noticed this tweet from Rosenthal, the New York Times’s editorial page editor, which he posted at 1:42 p.m.: “Sickeningly quick. RT @BryanJFischer Shooters attack an elementary school in CT – another ‘gun-free zone.’ Makes children sitting ducks.”

We tended to agree with Rosenthal that Fischer, an official of the American Family Association who is a frequent contributor to this column, should have been more circumspect. The point about gun-free zones is a pertinent one, but the immediate aftermath of a horrific massacre is not the time to be picking arguments about divisive political issues. That’s why our Friday column was about other topics.

But there would be no such circumspection from Rosenthal and the Times. By 4:47 p.m., he was pounding the table: “Bloomberg wonders, http://bit.ly/VG0shC, and so do we, http://nyti.ms/U0QUkP, when it WILL be time to do something about gun violence.” The second link was to a Times editorial, which appeared in Saturday’s paper but was published earlier than usual on the Web–sickeningly quick, one might say–using the Connecticut massacre as a peg to argue for more-restrictive firearms laws.

David Frum was even quicker than the Times. Friday morning he tweeted: “Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.” The sour sarcasm was especially out of place, and the comment was a bizarre non sequitur. We’ve never heard of a school without adults.

Frum’s tweet drew many responses from people who found it offensive. In the afternoon he answered them unrepentantly in a Daily Beast essay. He explained that his “first reaction” to the shooting “was anger,” which he “ventilated.” But note that he directed his anger at people who had committed no wrongful acts but merely disagreed with him:

I’ll accept no lectures about “sensitivity” on days of tragedy like today from people who work the other 364 days of the year against any attempt to prevent such tragedies.

It’s bad enough to have a gun lobby. It’s the last straw when that lobby also sets up itself as the civility police. It may not be politically possible to do anything about the prevalence of weapons of mass murder. But it damn well ought to be possible to complain about them–and about the people who condone them.

Of course you can complain about them. And they can complain about you, which is all they did. You can complain back, as you did, and so on and so on. It’s all part of the glorious free marketplace of ideas, albeit not its finest product. But the notion that your complaining is constructive while your detractors’ complaining is murderous is delusionary.

This is all quite typical. Every time one of these horrible shooting sprees occurs, countless voices in the media declaim that (1) we need a debate on gun control, and (2) the other side’s views are despicable, stupid and unworthy of consideration. The “debate” they say they want is a one-sided one. Of course, they are conducting just such a “debate.” What infuriates them is that the other side refuses to cooperate and disappear.

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