Mass shootings are still, statistically, quite rare in the United States (though not as rare as they are in rest of the world). Still, there are enough of them that our reactions, especially on social media, are ritualized: an outpouring of shock and panic is followed by a flurry of misinformation; Monday's navy yard shooting saw two news outlets confidently reporting the name of the shooter only to retract it within minutes.

Hot on the heels of misinformation come those who all fit in the generous category of "contextualizers": people who want to shade the event with their own understanding of the world. These colorists come in all political stripes and armed with varying degrees of tact. There are both gun control advocates and gun enthusiasts, "false flag" conspiracy theorists and seekers of silver linings.

Understandably, only the optimists get a pass from the hyper-vigilant emotional etiquette police of Twitter. In fact, the call to "not politicize" the event is as much a part of the formal exercise as wreath-layings and lapel ribbons.

Recently, though, more commenters have come to recognize that refusing to contextualize a tragedy is also a political act – a tacit form of approving the status quo.

On Twitter, David Frum turned his frustration over that blind spot into a string of sarcastic tweets describing the "rules" for covering violence – "All gun owners are to be complimented as responsible and law-abiding until they personally have hurt themselves or somebody else." The immediate, sustained and unintentionally hilarious backlash against "douche-ghoul David Frum" from pro-gun activists kind of proved his point.

I share Frum's frustration, and his politics on this issue, but I'm going to grant the douche-ghoul hunters a win: OK, sure, let's not bring gun policy up after a mass shooting. It's probably not worth it, right?

We gun control advocates bring it up; you guys start waving your arms (see what I did there?) and sending out fundraising emails. You wind up winning. Every fricking time, you win. As the Colorado recall election showed, even when we win, you just win later.

I give up. I'll make you a deal! I promise I won't bring up gun control after the next mass shooting.

However, I have a list of events after which I will bring it up. I hope you don't mind.

1). When the unemployment rate of a metropolitan area breaks 9%, or when a region has a spike in poverty. All but three of the cities with the most gun violence in the United States have unemployment rates above 9%. Studies have found that unemployment is one of the strongest predictors of gun violence in cities: the correlation is .55 for all gun deaths and .72 for gun-related murders.

Another analysis at the state level found that poverty was more highly correlated with gun violence than almost any other characteristic – more than drug use, mental illness, or the presence of weapons in high schools. The link between poverty and gun deaths also blows out the popular gun advocate truism that high rates of violence in Chicago somehow disprove the need for restrictions. But at the neighborhood level, the data just show how safe you are if you are both rich and unarmed. In Chicago's wealthier neighborhoods, gun crime (and gun possession) are almost nonexistent; in its poorest neighborhoods, the homicide rates place them among the most violent city districts in America.

2). When a white, male, non-church-going conservative who is divorced or separated moves to a state with lax gun laws. Those are the demographic traits most highly correlated to committing suicide – usually by gun. Suicide by firearm has outpaced gun homicide since the Center for Disease Control started keeping statistics in 1981, but as gun homicides have declined, suicides have become a greater share.

In 2010, there were almost twice as many gun suicides per 100,000 as there were homicides: 6.3 versus 3.6 – and those suicides were concentrated in states with the fewest restrictions on gun ownership, with men comprising 87% of all gun homicides. Indeed, for men, gun ownership is a stronger predictor for death by firearm suicide than previous suicidal behavior. This is largely because those who attempt suicide by gun succeed 90% of the time. They will never get a second chance, either to try again or to live.

3). When the country goes to war. Firearm suicide rates among soldiers are staggeringly high – around 300 a year every year since 2009. Last year, suicides outnumbered deaths in combat duty.

Among veterans, the numbers are high and unprecedented: between 2005 and 2011, 49,000 former service members took their own lives, a rate of 30 per 100,0000 – twice that of the civilian population. Experts, unsurprisingly, cite the mix of untreated depression and easy access to guns as a deadly mix.

Among active-duty military, firearms are used in about 70% of the completed suicide attempts. The Department of Defense has taken valuable steps to deter these tragedies, and has identified getting guns out of the hands of suicidal soldiers as the most effective method. They have faced obstruction from the National Rifle Association in this (in 2012, the NRA lobbied for and got legislation that barred commanders from collecting information about troops' personal weapons).

As far as veterans' firearms go, the NRA has also blocked attempts to separate those suicidal individuals from lethal weapons. The NRA engineered the rejection of a legislative proposal from Senator Chuck Schumer to transfer the Veterans Affairs database of those deemed too "mentally incompetent" to handle their finances to the national background check database.

None of those measures is probably as effective as simply reducing the need for soldiers. When Switzerland cut the size of its armed forces in half between 2003 and 2004, suicide by firearm rates declined significantly for men 18-43. Researchers found that the decrease in the size of the military correlated more strongly to the drop than did other social factors, including unemployment. Suicides among demographic groups not affected by the cut did not decline.

4). When there is a report of domestic violence. Domestic violence is the strongest predictor of violent death for women. Women who suffer domestic violence are 14.6 times more likely to die by firearm, and in 75-85% of domestic violence gun homicides, the perpetrator has a history of domestic violence.

The 1996 Lautenberg amendment banned the purchase or ownership of firearms by those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence. In reality, though, the law has a dangerously narrow scope: it applies only to married partners, only to instances of physical (not psychological) abuse or attempted abuse, only to cases eligible to be tried by a jury and/or represented by counsel; and it does not apply to individuals who face restraining orders. The law also does not give officials the legal authority to confiscate the weapons of those who face charges, but have not yet been convicted.

Only nine states ask police to remove the weapons from a home when responding to a domestic violence call. Twenty-three states have no laws having to do with the presence of firearms at the scene of domestic violence. Even more distressingly, a recent Johns Hopkins study found that only 12% of domestic violence victims whose assailant was armed reported that the abuser, in fact, surrendered or had the firearms seized under the Lautenberg amendment.

5). When we send a nonviolent drug offender to prison rather than treatment. After a nonviolent offender is sent to prison, there is a one in five chance that he will be arrested for a violent crime within three years of release. (There is a seven in ten chance he will be arrested, period; and over a quarter will return to prison on some charge.) On the other hand, study after study shows that treatment reduces the chances of future drug offenses as well as any other arrests by as much as 51% and 64%, respectively.

There's even an argument for mitigating the incarceration of more violent offenders. As a Pew report put it:

Once incarcerated, drug dealers tend to be quickly replaced by new dealers… younger and more prone to violence than their predecessors … incarcerating the foot soldiers in drug gangs … has a negligible impact on crime. Moreover, by creating job openings in drug-dealing organizations, it draws more people into criminal lifestyles and may, in certain cases, exacerbate crime.

Under this agreement, we will totally not talk about gun laws after a mass shooting. We will talk about it every day.