Then there are the responses to tragic shootings. If a pro-gun group uses a tragedy to justify gun rights, it’s morbid and cruel. If anti-Second Amendment folks do it, though, well, that’s just fine.

Democrats vowed Wednesday to push new gun-control legislation and to try to revive stalled bills in Michigan’s Republican-led Legislature following a mass shooting that left four high school students dead and others with serious injuries.

But GOP leaders, who have long opposed such measures and have favored looser restrictions, did not immediately commit to policy changes.

“We can’t do nothing,” Sen. Rosemary Bayer, a Democrat whose district includes Oxford High School, told reporters after senators held a moment of silence for the dead. “We have to take action. Right this minute, today, I think I really, really want to focus on the families and … just trying to help them know that we’re here for them, that we’re supporting them in any way we can.”

Actually, you can do nothing. Why? Because still don’t know a lot about what happened.

The father of the shooter had just purchased the firearm a few days earlier. He underwent a background check and passed it. Then he was apparently the victim of a crime when his son stole the gun and took it to school, violating numerous state and federal laws, then opened fire, killing three people.

Now, there is a bill in the legislature there in Michigan that gun control supporters are claiming might have prevented this from happening.

In June, Bayer introduced legislation aimed at holding accountable adults who fail to secure their firearms. The 15-year-old charged in Tuesday’s slayings, Ethan Crumbley, illegally had a handgun that his father had bought four days earlier, authorities said.

The bill would require adults to keep a firearm in a securely locked container if they know it is accessible to minors. If a minor obtained the gun and used it to kill or injure, the adult would face up to five years in prison. There would be exceptions if minors have permission for activities like target practice and hunting.

Republicans have not held a hearing on the measure or other gun-control legislation.

Of course, that would look like the kind of thing that might have an impact, but would it? Or, would it have simply given the killer’s family one more thing to suffer through.

I don’t care if the shooter suffers. Let him. But the family didn’t pull that trigger.

I also haven’t seen any reports of what precautions the father might have taken. A locked gun doesn’t do a lot of good if the kid can somehow get the key, and there are times you’re going to hand your kid your keys for whatever reason.

So would it have done any good? Probably not.

And that says nothing about the fact that it punishes someone other than the shooter for the crime. There’s absolutely nothing right about that and anyone with any sense of justice should be able to see that.

If you want to stop these kinds of things, focus on what drives people to carry out these kinds of horrific crimes and focus there. After all, as we saw in Waukesha not that long ago, you can kill and hurt a lot of people without using a single firearm, so focusing on the people prevents those kinds of crimes as well.

But leave it to the anti-Second Amendment types to use the bodies of the slain as a soapbox from which to advocate the further curtailments of your rights.

Typical.