Following the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College, a “smoldering” (as one commentator put it) President Obama gave a revealing speech — a clarification, a culmination, of much that had come before. “[W]hat’s become routine,” he said, “of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: ‘We need more guns,’ they’ll argue. . . . Does anybody really believe that?” “This is a political choice we make,” he claimed, “to allow this to happen every few months in America.”

The president’s frustration, after delivering a sad series of similar speeches, is understandable. But his argument is still indefensible.
Even if you support “common-sense gun legislation” (as I do), there was nothing in Obama’s speech that effectively argued for it. No policy proposals or serious justifications. No one listening to the speech would be persuaded to take a position he or she did not already hold. Obama was saying, in essence, that it is obvious what we should do about mass gun violence, that evil people are blocking it, and that they have innocent blood on their hands.

This is apparently what some liberals think when anger releases them from civility and rationality. Obama speaks as if the gun laws he wants passed would put an end to these killings — a position for which there is no evidence. I believe that more thorough background checks and further restrictions on the type and firepower of weapons, along with improved health services for the severely mentally ill, would be good for our society, apart from mass killings. I hope that, in the long term, this system might, just might, intervene before a prospective mass killer strikes (though such causality would be very hard to demonstrate). But I have no basis for the calumny that people who disagree with me are choosing to allow mass murder.

This is the politics of moral posturing, not an argument rooted in social science. With his last election behind him, Obama is free to be Obama. And it appears that he is, deep down, a liberal commentator of the MSNBC variety — perhaps providing a preview of his post-presidency. The only apparent purpose of his gun speech was to incite the faithful by expressing a seething arrogance.