Wow. The gun nuts are already using the PA stabbing to push the "guns don't kill people" argument.

[friendly_iconoclast]

158. Imposing religious views on enumerated rights is also bad

Especially if the true believers insist that they "know" that Their Way Is The True Way
while insisting that Satan's...err, the NRA's hand is behind every move to oppose them.

It's hardly an original insight, Eric Hoffer described it brilliantly in The True Believer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

Successful mass movements need not believe in a god, but they must believe in a devil. Hatred unifies the true believers, and "the ideal devil is a foreigner" attributed with nearly supernatural powers of evil.[17] For example, Hitler described Jews as foreign interlopers and moreover an ephemeral Jewishness alleged to taint the German soul was as vehemently condemned as were flesh-and-blood Jews. The hatred of a true believer is actually a disguised self-loathing, as with the condemnation of capitalism by socialists while Russia under the Bolsheviks saw more intensive monopolization of the economy than any other nation in history. Without a devil to hate, mass movements often falter (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek effectively led millions of Chinese during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and '40s, but quickly fell out of favor once the Japanese were defeated).

The True Believer, Chapter XIV, "Unifying Agents"

65

Hate

...Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never
without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the
vividness and tangibility of its devil...It is perhaps true that the insight and shrewdness
of the men that know how to set a mass movement in motion, or how to keep one going,
manifest themselves as much in knowing how to pick a worthy enemy as in knowing what
doctrine to emplace and what program to adopt.

It would seem this also applies to mass movements manqué...