Esquire’s Dave Holmes is the latest to try to poke holes in what he sees as the good guy with a gun “fantasy.” You idiots think you could have done something about Sandy Hook if you’d been there? Parkland? YouTube? It’s delusional!

This happens like clockwork now. The NRA, well within the time frame wherein we are not supposed to politicize a tragedy, goes out and suggests that the only answer is more guns. They will fall back on the absurd notion that only a good guy with a gun could stop a bad guy with a gun. They will find a person who, in the heat of the moment, is entertaining their own childish hero fantasy; they will build a whole policy argument around it, and then they will tell you to stop being so emotional.

The time period in which we’re not supposed to politicize a tragedy? While we missed the memo announcing the prescribed, respectful number of days before commenting, Holmes is apparently unaware of his fellow civilian disarmament honks who jump on news of a shooting like Michael Moore on a ham sandwich.

Check the time stamp. That was only a couple of hours after the shooting was reported. There were still hundreds of cops at YouTube HQ stepping around pools of blood.

The NRA has learned from experience that sitting back a “respectful” amount of time gets them nothing. Worse, it allows the enemies of Second Amendment rights to seize the narrative in their attempt to drum up support for ever more gun control legislation. Wayne LaPierre waited almost a week after Sandy Hook to make a statement and was pilloried for it.

Looking back on a mass shooting and wishing you’d had a gun is natural. It is the life or death version of the French idea of l’esprit de l’escalier, the wit of the staircase, the one devastating conversational clapback you think of five minutes after it would have been useful. We long to recast negative experiences as positive ones with ourselves as the hero. It’s human. It’s also really fucking stupid, and the fact that it’s influencing policy is an embarrassment .

Mr. Holmes apparently isn’t aware that according to even the CDC’s conservative analysis (at the request of President Obama), there are at least 500,000 defensive gun uses (and probably a lot more) in this country every year. So yes, people with guns do stop crimes like rape, robbery and murder every single day.

But laws shouldn’t reflect passion. Laws should reflect reason. Data shows very clearly that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. On the other hand, we have this emotion, this childish fantasy borne out of trauma and impotence. Right now, they’re running about even. No more. NRA, for once, fuck your feelings.

Sorry. That thud you just heard was the sound of my jaw hitting the keyboard. Because emotion is the anti-gun crowd’s primary weapon of mass distraction against the right to keep and bear arms. If they gave that up, there’d literally be nothing left in their quiver.

Emotion and the heat of the moment (never let a crisis go to waste) is precisely how states like Connecticut, New York and Maryland slammed through even more restrictive laws, including “assault weapons” bans after Sandy Hook. Acting in the heat of the moment is why you saw a Republican governor like Rick Scott, in a famously pro-gun state like Florida, sign a gun control bill into law in the middle of a Senate run.

Actual application of reason, as Holmes says he desires, reveals that literally none of the measures Scott has signed into law would have done a single thing to stop a Nikolas Cruz. Or an Adam Lanza. Or a Dylan Roof. They were able to commit their hideous crimes due to social and institutional failures by multiple parties that let them slip through the cracks for years before they eventually snapped.

But try telling that to someone like a Dave Holmes. My guess is you won’t get very far. Because as he sees it, enough is enough. It’s time to do something about guns. Never mind how ineffective or burdensome the something is for millions of law-abiding Americans. Hey, that seems suspiciously like an emotions-driven response rather an application of reason or intellect.

The point is, Holmes isn’t unique. He and his fellow anti-gun travelers are expert at projection; accusing their opponents of the very actions they themselves are famous for. Do they just not see it? Or is that just SOP?