Wow. I’ve been beaten to the punch. This will teach me to hold back my comments in the wake of a tragedy. But we now have voices from as far left as Atrios in a brilliant post, to Klein to Virginia Governir Tim Kaine to Sullivan’s interns cautioning against using the VT tragedy to advance ideas about security.

The consensus, at least it some circles, is that you can’t really do much to stop a madman. There’s not much you can learn from an extreme random event. These events are, thankfully, stochastic in our society. So locking down campi, grabbing guns, distributing guns or putting anti-depressants in the water isn’t going to do much good. And there are greater ills to heal with the effort being spent.

Of course, if Barrack Obama just said what Ben Smith says he said (hat tip, Lee), it’s his first major gaffe. Using the VT tragedy to segue into hurtful language and outsourcing is . . . words fail me. Somewhere, Hillary is grinning.