Before we knew all that much about what had happened, before many Americans had even caught word of it, before the ones who were aware had moved past horror and numbness, Paris wasn’t just a massacre.

It was a megaphone to be used for whatever you yearned to shout.

That’s how it works in this era of Internet preening, out-of-control partisanship and press-a-button punditry, when anything and everything becomes prompt for a plaint, a rant, a riff.

It all happens in the click of a mouse, its metabolism too furious to allow for decorum or real perspective.

I woke Saturday morning to Paris-pegged commentary about not just gun control and free speech on American campuses but also climate change—yes, climate change—and of course immigration, albeit to the United States, not France.

What does Paris have to do with climate change?

Well, apparently President Obama’s justly profound concern about rising temperatures is proof of his inadequate attention to terrorism and an indictment of his ability to do triage overall.

Or so I gather from a column written by Roger L. Simon for PJ Media. Simon characterized Obama as “a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror.”

Does battling the latter prohibit battling the former?

Simon also mentioned that Obama had once referred to the Islamic State as “the JV team” and had sought to scale down American military commitments abroad. While I question the usefulness of bashing Obama within 24 hours of the Paris attacks, I acknowledge that his past and present assessments of the Islamic State and his readiness (or not) to use American might are fair points of debate in the context of Paris and how we respond to it.

But I don’t for the life of me see why Miller and many others, including Coulter, felt the need to construct a bridge from Paris to Mizzou and Yale.

Yes, some American students’ demands for “safe spaces” have gone much too far, endangering free speech and a vital exchange of ideas. Yes, the Yale campus is overwrought (I’ve watched that viral video). And, yes, the insult of certain Halloween costumes pales beside the bloodshed in Paris. Duh.

But there are countless offenses and injustices that pale beside the bloodshed in Paris — what doesn’t? — and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the people articulating those offenses and injustices would claim otherwise. Using Paris to delegitimize them is puerile. It’s also tasteless, cheapening what happened there.

At this point it’s our ingrained habit to rush with dizzying speed into hyper-political overdrive and treat any shocking new development as fresh fodder for an old argument. That’s what Newt Gingrich did, joining Coulter in crying out for more firearms: