[Strangler Lewis]

Just as with capital punishment, cases like these are all make weights. We say that we need a death penalty for Hitler or Bin Laden or Gacy when what we really want to do is execute the poor black kid who never had the chance to know better.

With guns, we use absurd cases like Holmes to get to our goal of being Bernard Goetz or George Zimmerman.

I'm also generally struck by the fact--perception?--that the people who want to carry guns in the interest of perfect and impenetrable security are the same people who want to drive overly large vehicles at unregulated rates of speed on the theory that you can't remove all risk--read, risk to others--from daily life.