Gail: You’re right. And when our president said “it’s a little bit soon” to start talking about guns, I did instinctively feel it was time to start talking about guns.

We’re definitely not going to have any disagreements here. Which brings me back to New York last week. Your column about living next to the terror attack was perfect. The one relief after a horrible event like that is the way average people come together. And people who in most circumstances wouldn’t be average — like a lot of your neighbors near the financial district — lose all their ego for a moment and just find comfort in being part of the group.

Bret: Thanks so much, Gail. That really was the striking thing: In the face of a terrorist and terrible carnage, people behaved with composure, decency and courage. I wanted to write a column that paid tribute to this, to the simple neighborliness and good citizenship of New Yorkers.

Gail: I remember right after 9/11 going down and seeing the hulk of the tower and running into Hillary Clinton, who was then one of our senators. She’s always had a not-unsurprising guarded reserve around the media, but that day she seemed to have lost all her barriers. She was just talking away about who was doing what, and what President Bush had said on the plane, and it occurred to me that she presumed that at that moment we were just two people in the community. That our normal roles had dissolved because nobody could possibly care about anything except the tragedy.

Maybe that was part of the reason I was so enraged at President Trump for instantly trying to make the story about how tough he is on ISIS. I can’t remember the last time I got so viscerally angry at a politician.

Bret: Among my 10 million or so objections to presidential candidate Trump, one of them was that he would be incapable of fulfilling the moral, emotional and symbolic role of the office. Obama and Bush both did, and I’ll never forget Clinton’s moving speech after the Oklahoma City bombing. But it’s the mark of the narcissist that he won’t, or can’t, perform the role, because ultimately the only needs and feelings that concern him are his own.

Gail: We are now really well aware of the difference between an egotist, which is pretty much all politicians, and a narcissist, which is somebody you just cannot have in the top job.