After writing a partial defense of Jeb Bush late last week, when critics were laying in to him for shrugging off mass killings, a number of readers wrote to remind me that Republicans had themed their presidential nominating convention in 2012 after a Barack Obama quote they’d intentionally ripped from context. If Republicans were willing to use the phrase “you didn’t build that” to weaken Obama, then turnabout’s fair play, and Democrats should weaken Bush by turning “stuff happens” into a rallying cry.

These readers were implicitly ceding the point that decontextualizing Bush’s response to the Oregon killings is a misleading and instrumentalist way to attack him. But even thinking in the most cynical terms, throwing “stuff happens” in Bush’s face to suggest he has no sympathy for victims of gun violence is a tactical error as well as an intellectual one.

“Stuff happens,” Bush said. “There’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not always the right thing to do.”

The trouble with this statement isn’t the phrase “stuff happens,” or even the (completely uncontroversial) observation that sometimes crises and tragedies have no obvious government remedies. The trouble is that Bush both ceded the point that some crises do merit government action, and also suggested that routine mass killings don’t fall into this category. “Stuff happens” wasn’t Bush’s response to the killings in Oregon last week—it’s the essence of his overall gun control policy, and the gun control policy of the entire Republican Party. Killing is senseless, but guns are great, and we must accept killings as a price of our freedom to own them.

On Tuesday, Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson, a famous surgeon who has operated on gun assault victims, made the same point in much starker terms. “As a Doctor,” Carson wrote, “I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies. There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking—but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”