‘This is the world you wanted’

Nancy Kaffer,

Detroit Free Press: “Congratulations. This is the world you wanted. Yes, you, Mr. or Ms. ardent and inflexible defender of unbridled gun rights. ... This fight is over. It was over after 26 first-graders and school workers were murdered in Newtown, Conn. It’s over now. Our lawmakers will continue to work to loosen, not tighten, gun laws. ... So to our political opponents, congratulations — this is the world you wanted. We just have to live in it. If we can.”

Gregg Jarrett,

Fox News: “Hillary Clinton urged Americans to ‘put politics aside.’ Then she proceeded to immediately inject politics into the catastrophic shooting in Las Vegas. Clinton knew she could not call for a ban of a weapon already banned by law. The fully automatic weapon allegedly used by Stephen Paddock was made illegal under federal law back in 1986. So Clinton invented an ancillary argument that more people would have died if (he) had used a ‘silencer.’ ... Suppressors do not function well on automatic weapons. They tend to melt or malfunction under the intense heat of automatic fire. For this reason, there are only a few companies that even manufac- ture them for use on automatic weapons. And there is almost no marketplace for them.”

Nicholas Kristof,

The New York Times: “By my calculations, we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by more than 95% since 1921. There was no single solution but rather many incremental efforts: seat belts, air bags, padded dashboards, better bumpers, lighted roads, highway guardrails, graduated licenses for young people, crackdowns on drunken driving, limits on left turns and so on. We haven’t banned automobiles, and we haven’t eliminated auto deaths, but we have learned to make them safer — and we should do the same with guns. This is a particularly American tragedy. ... So let’s mourn. But even more important, let’s act.”

David D. Haynes,

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “We’ll forget you existed, Stephen Paddock. You are now the worst mass shooter in U.S. history, but we’ll forget you. ... We will choose to be distracted, and we will forget. Wherever your miserable soul has landed ... you will be forgotten, too. I can promise you that. It’s what we do.”