To give this a better framing, say after Sandy Hook, I&#x27;d wager that the first response in the mind of a liberal was, &quot;Fuck! See, guns kill! If we didn&#x27;t have the 2nd ammendment, so many children wouldn&#x27;t have had to die!&quot; For a conservative, their first response might have been, &quot;Fuck! This is why teachers need guns to protect their children from crazymen! More children didn&#x27;t have to die!&quot; May be I&#x27;m a little too naive, but I really don&#x27;t think people are insincerely manufacturing rage, both are upset about the tragedy, they just rationalize it in the mental framework they already have, and they sincerely respond with that mindset.<p>I think the better question is why can&#x27;t we be more rational&#x2F;scientific about this. Forget gut feelings, put down a spreadsheet (at least) how many instances of this statistic correlate with this hypothesis. If it doesn&#x27;t work, clearly your intuition is wrong, and there&#x27;s nothing wrong with that, you just need to sharpen your intuition. I&#x27;d like to see government work like that, but neither side seems to want to do something like that.