Start here. Adam Lanza can’t be accused or convicted of “unconscionable evil,” not in the court of public opinion and not by the criteria of moral philosophy. He wasn’t making a moral choice when he shot his mother in the face with her own gun, and then killed twenty defenseless children. So individual responsibility and culpability aren’t at issue, as they have not been and cannot be since Columbine.

It follows that the NRA’s slogan, to the effect that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is moot at best — the killers in every case were sentient beings, but not one was a person at the law or anywhere else in the landscape of possibility most of us can take for granted. Not one was an individual who came to the scene of the crime equipped with a conscience, thus able to make moral choices.

It also follows, logically at least, that better regulation of access to guns is actually consistent with the NRA’s stupid slogan: the man who slaughtered those twenty children was not an individual, a person able to distinguish between right and wrong. So let us hereafter make sure that the people who want to kill other people are persons who can make moral choices — screen them thoroughly when they buy guns, or send them to the State Department with fair warning to all concerned at home and abroad.