AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

We stand in the wake of yet another mass shooting. We’re still trying to get all the facts, to understand the horrors that took place, and to figure out what the hell happened.

The Washington Post, however, thinks it knows what happened.

And when gunfire broke out Tuesday at a science, technology, engineering and mathematics school in Colorado, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo lunged at the shooter. He was fatally shot. Witnesses said his actions gave other students a chance to safely get away.

We mourn the loss of these people. They were heroes. Faced with the unimaginable, they were unshrinking. But the fact that people going about the business of everyday life — saying a prayer, giving a college presentation, sitting in English class — feel compelled to throw themselves into the line of fire puts to shame our so-called political leaders, who don’t even have the guts to pass sensible gun reform.

The Post routinely publishes polls that show the majority of Americans supposedly favor gun control.

The Post routinely publishes op-eds and articles designed to make it appear that gun control is not just favored, but a viable strategy for dealing with all sorts of violence.

The Post typically doesn’t publish things that undermine the anti-gun narrative.

All of this creates a picture for political leaders that tells them gun control is not just a winning position, but a beneficial one for society. So then how is it a lack of guts to go against the supposed crowd? How does that work in its warped little bubble at the Washington Post editorial board?

Of course, the board is also acting like there’s nothing to be done except gun control, that we’re already doing everything else humanly possible and none of it is working. That gun control is the only possible alternative.

Which, of course, is total equine excrement.

The truth of the matter is that, for the most part, gun control is the only “solution” being discussed. In the wake of Parkland, when Republicans started talking about hardening schools, anti-gunners went nuts. These officials were accused of trying to turn our schools into prisons or some such nonsense.

However, such efforts wouldn’t necessarily compromise the rights of students. It would mitigate the threat from other potential actors, such as terrorists who may decide to launch a school shooting of their own.

Frankly, that is only one aspect of what we can and should be talking about. I’ve long beat the drum on needing to understand the mechanisms that lead someone to want to commit an act like this. That would allow us to find and treat this pathology before lives are genuinely at stake.

It’s too bad progressive lawmakers don’t have the guts to go against the Washington Post editorial board and at least talk about these other potential solutions. Instead, their cowardice–actual cowardice, it turns out since they believe the public backs anti-gun measures–will result in the next senseless tragedy, all because they wouldn’t consider anything but gun control.