Bret Stephens: Somewhere between the appearance of Jeff Sessions before the Senate and the Cosby Horror Show mistrial, we had this awful attempted massacre of Representative Steve Scalise, the G.O.P. whip, and others on a baseball field in Virginia. This seems to have prompted three types of reaction from the national commentariat: He (the shooter) is nuts; you (the person on the other side of the political divide) are nuts; we (the country in which all bad things conspire to produce this) are nuts. Where do you come down?

Gail Collins: I would certainly never say you’re nuts, Bret.

Obviously the Virginia shooter was crazy, and if we had a semi-sane gun culture he might not have had a weapon that destructive. The idea that the Second Amendment guarantees your right to tote around a rifle that can shoot forever — some of them will fire 100 bullets before reloading — is nuts for sure.

Bret: This inevitably is going to be an issue that forever divides liberals and conservatives, but I’m hard-pressed to see this shooting as a gun story. For starters, the rifle he used typically has a 10-round magazine (though I understand they can go as high as 40). Also, while I’m all for keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people, he would have been unlikely to have been diagnosed as such. He was an angry and abusive man, like many other Americans — with the same right to own a rifle as millions of other Americans.

That seems to me the nub of the issue. I don’t have any particular fondness for guns or gun culture. But like it or not, the Second Amendment licenses the possession of all kinds of firearms that can do grave damage in the hands of the wrong people. I wish liberals would be more forthright and say it’s the amendment that needs to change, not the size of magazine clips.