Now is not the time.

"Now is not the time to talk about this, we must simply mourn the dead and not sully their memories with politics."

This is no one's direct quote. I wrote it. But it encapsulates one particular aspect of the reaction to our latest spree shooting. It is a prim, proper, puritanical impulse, all of our Church Lady Grandmothers know it well. In the wake of unpleasant things, we do not talk about unpleasant things.

Indeed, reading my Facebook feed yesterday in the aftermath of the massacre, one could have gotten the impression that what happened was a tragedy that didn't involve a man walking into a school and executing kindergartners at all! Lots of "heaven has new angels" and "thoughts and prayers going out" and other expressions of deep and abiding grief and on and on. But there was little or no recognition that a man did something terrible, no recognition of agency, and certainly little or no recognition that he did so with gun. For all a Man from Mars would have known, a school bus got hit by a freight train.

This is, I think, a very American state of mind. And there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's how we are. But the political sphere has learned that the sincere desire to keep tragedies apolitical and under-wraps is a powerful weapon when harnessed correctly. We see it every time a man kills a lot of people all at once with hardware that no regular person has any business having. Just when we might be waking up to the abject lunacy of things like high-capacity magazines and body armor in civilian hands, we're told to drop it, you insensitive prick, and come to the candlelight vigil.