FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I owe this one to Chuck Gilligan, 

who thinks he was late to Lampchop but beat me to it.

•  The response to the San Bernardino shoot-'em-up has been everything we could expect -- that is, a nightmare. For one thing it's a gift to hardcore Muslim-haters like Robert Spencer, who was completely mum about the Planned Parenthood massacre but believes that because these latest in a series of  shooters are Muslim- instead of honky-American it's not gun-craziness but jihad that killed all those people. (I wonder what Spencer wants for Americans who are Muslim? Concentration camps? Expulsion? He likes to tantalize on the subject, perhaps waiting for the day when something more intemperate may catch fire.) We also have propagandists like Mollie Hemingway saying that if you dare make fun of gun nuts who offer prayers over the red harvest, you're actually being religious yourself -- to the "god of federal government," whom we know to be false because legislation "never solves the problem of man’s fallen condition," so it's useless -- once every head has bowed and every knee bent to Mean Conservative Jesus, he'll fix this mass murder thing, maybe, if he feels like it, and if he doesn't there's a good, unknowable reason. Theodicy!

•  If conservatives are all a little crazier that usual in their reaction to these massacres, I think it's because the gun-control ground has shifted a bit under their feet; the bill Senate Democrats put up to ban terror-list people from getting guns was a stunt -- nobody expected it to pass, so it was just meant to heighten the contradictions -- but it was a clever stunt, as the long moratorium on serious gun control and some high-profile incidents have begun to wear on the public. Conservatives are in the position usually held by liberals -- armed with the evidence that gun violence has actually diminished, but unable to make the sale, as liberals have been when it comes to violence against police -- and conservatives aren't used to it; also, rage is a key part of their shtick, not to mention their psychological profile, so that's what they double up on in times of uncertainty. Longtime readers will know I'm much more bearish, not to say despairing, on the subject; as long as everything else that's wrong with this country makes citizens feel powerless, they're not going to let go of the hope that they'll either be rich some day or at least sufficiently well-armed to feel secure in their persons.