The Pew Research Center tells us that last week’s slaughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School “triggered a conversation different from those that followed other recent U.S. gun tragedies.”
Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at blogs, at tweets, and at newspapers. A discussion of gun policy dominated the social media conversation, and “calls for stricter gun control measures exceeded defenses of current gun laws and policies by more than two to one.” On the editorial and op-ed pages of the 11 papers Pew examined, the reaction was even more lopsided—more than six columns and editorials calling for stricter laws for every piece defending the laws we’ve got.