"Prayer and Reflection" = Not Talking About Gun Control When We Obviously Should

"There are going to be other days for politics. This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection." -- President Obama

This sanctimonious gesture of "setting aside politics for a day" is itself, of course, absolutely political, and, more to the point, it both reflects and re-inscribes quite directly and insistently the dysfunctional and reactionary gun politics of the U.S.A. One day a President will treat a day like this as an occasion to talk honestly to the American people about common sense gun regulation and do something about avoidable gun violence in this country, and one has to wonder how many people will die who otherwise would not because this was not that day.

Needless to say, Romney's use of this tragedy as an occasion to try to convince American voters that a robot can feel human sadness was just as useless as Obama's, in more ways than one.