The nation is once again morning the loss of life at another senseless mass shooting. What took place Monday night at Michigan State University is a tragedy no matter how you look at it. We all know that to be true.

Where things get shaky is in how we think it best to respond to such a tragedy.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats throughout the nation have responded to what happened, and it’s not pretty.

Michigan Democrats are considering speeding up the passage of new gun legislation in the state following a shooting at Michigan State University on Monday evening that left three people dead.

The drive for new legislation will be one of the first significant tests of Democratic Party governance in the state since the midterm elections. Last year, Democrats unexpectedly captured “trifecta” control of Michigan, with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cruising to reelection and her party narrowly flipping both state legislative chambers, too.

…

“We’re going to try to move faster,” Democratic state Sen. Rosemary Bayer said in an interview Tuesday morning. “After years of not getting an inch, now we’re making real plans.”

“Some of the legislation we have goes back 10 years,” added Bayer, who represented the town of Oxford in 2021, when four students died in a mass shooting at a high school there. “We just haven’t been able to get any traction to do anything.”

That’s right. Pretty much all the measures they have been stymied on will come out once again. Plus, as noted, there’s a Democratic majority in Michigan, so there’s a good chance of many of those passing.

And Democrats didn’t wait long, either.

They’ve already introduced three bills in the wake of Michigan State, even before all the dust has settled.

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said during her State of the State address last month that she wants lawmakers to send three gun safety measures her way to enact universal background checks, allow extreme risk protection orders to keep guns away from those deemed a danger to themselves or others and institute safe storage requirements.

Yes, these measures were already likely in the works. Now, with what happened at Michigan State, they’ll get renewed focus and opposition will be blasted as supporting the shooting. It’s not like some of the Democrats in the state have gone out of their way to be rational, as Cam noted on Tuesday.

But it’s not just Michigan that’s jumping on the bandwagon.

The White House has made its opinions known as well, and it’s a bit of a shocker. President Biden didn’t just call for an assault weapon ban.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday afternoon issued a statement in response to a shooting at Michigan State University that left three students dead and five others wounded, and renewed his call for Congress to enact stronger gun control laws.

In the statement, Biden said he and his wife, Jill, “are praying for the three students killed and the five students fighting for their lives after last night’s shooting.” He also said “our hearts are with these young victims and their families, the broader East Lansing and Lansing communities, and all Americans across the country grieving as the result of gun violence.”

“Too many American communities have been devastated by gun violence,” he said. “I have taken action to combat this epidemic in America, including a historic number of executive actions and the first significant gun safety law in nearly 30 years, but we must do more.”

But what exactly does the president have in mind?

Well, among other things, an assault weapon ban.

Yeah, he couldn’t help himself, I’m sure.

Biden renewed his demand, which he made part of his State of the Union address last week, that Congress enact “commonsense gun law reforms,” including background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, closing certain loopholes in the background check system and requiring guns to be stored safely.

Of course, there’s nothing here that would have prevented the Michigan State shooting, but as per usual, the shooting is little more than a pretext to push for the policies they wanted all along.

That’s true at both the federal and state level here, as we can clearly see.

However, let’s not forget that the two previous mass shootings were in California, which has pretty much all of that on the books. It did nothing to prevent people from being killed. In fact, each of those shootings killed more people than lost their lives at Michigan State.

So I’m sorry, how are these measures so essential when they clearly have already failed?

I don’t expect an answer from anti-gunners on this, unfortunately. They’re too busy working themselves into a frothing rage because we won’t just bow down and let them have their way on this issue.

Well, I’ve got one thing to tell them: Get used to disappointment.