At the opening of a hilarious South Park episode, the creators lurch into a moment of self-parody. The townspeople are running riotously through the streets in one of their frequent hysterical panics that have become a running gag in the series. But this time, the audience has yet to be told what caused the emotion-fueled outburst.

The schoolchildren are being carried along by the angry adult mob, as one kid breathlessly shouts to another “What the HELL is going on NOW?!?!”

That moment is a spot-on commentary about the American public’s instinct to demand emotional responses to threats. But this week, two news items made me think we might be outgrowing our inclinations toward thoughtless hysteria.

The first was a Rasmussen Poll, showing that 61 percent of us favor capital punishment for the lone surviving Boston bomber. My instant reaction: “That’s all???”

I don’t support capital punishment as a general idea. If I think government isn’t competent to deliver the mail efficiently - and I do - then it’s hypocritical to assume that it will reliably convict the right people. So giving the state the power to kill the people it convicts means it never has the ability to tell them “oops!”

That said, I have the same revenge lust that most do: I don’t get worked up when the gruesomely and clearly guilty get fried. However, practical matters should take precedence: If life in prison rather than death means learning something valuable from a killer, it’s worth the trade to me. Should our Boston bomber have information about others such as himself, I’d spare his head in exchange for finding out what’s in it.

It looks like a lot of my fellow Americans agree with me. Yet a dozen years ago, if Bin Laden had been captured just days after 9/11, I cannot help but think that the number screaming for his noggin would have been north of 90 percent. We wanted revenge - for justifiable reasons - and my personal memory of it was that we weren’t so much in a “thinking” mood.

The second refreshing item was a USA Today poll, showing support for new federal gun control laws had fallen dramatically, to below 50 percent, despite being as high as 61 percent just two months ago. Bad cases make bad law.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, the political response cued up was predictably ineffective and targeted to curtail the liberties of the law-abiding rather than address (if possible) the threat posed by the suicidally murderous. Twenty years ago, President Clinton would have (and did) get much more restrictive laws passed with the fickle winds of public opinion temporarily at his back.

But this time, the U.S. Senate declined to pass President Obama’s gun control bill. The U.S. Senate was conceived as the “cooler heads prevail” branch of the Congress - the place where longterm reason would trump overwrought emotions of the here and now.

And in a rare civics lesson, the Senate seems to have performed precisely that function, to the point where it got out ahead of where the American people were going to be, and behaved accordingly. I’m not one to consider any politician to be my “leader” - they work for me, not the other way around.

But in this rare case, they seem to have stumbled onto a rare case of leadership. These are hopeful signs that Americans may start demanding public policy based on thoughts rather than feelings. But it’s bad news for South Park.

Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan House for six years and is currently the director of policy for a political consulting firm. His employer is not responsible for what he says here ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.