The New York Times reports that there’s little to report on the Roseburg mass murder because law enforcement is still turning over rocks.

The last three paragraphs are somewhat striking though.

The issue of gun control has recently roiled Oregon. This year, state legislators passed a law closing a loophole for background checks on private gun sales, after years of trying to win support for it.

Sheriff Hanlin had forcefully lobbied against gun control after previous school shootings, but on Friday he told CNN that now was not the time to discuss gun control.

“We want to focus on completing this investigation, doing a thorough investigation,” he said. “And more importantly we want to focus on the families of the victims.”

Now is not the time to discuss gun control? The hell it’s not. Now is absolutely the time to discuss gun control, and the time to get gun control, too.

Obama said in his statement yesterday that people were going to say he’s politicizing this, and then he went on to say that we should be politicizing it, because what is it if not political? Damn right.

He also said prayers don’t do anything to stop these mass shootings from happening. CNN kept reporting that last night as his saying prayers no longer do anything to stop these mass shootings from happening, but that’s not what he said. CNN inserted the “no longer.” Fabulous reporting there, CNN: stick in words that he did not say, that change the meaning. He simply said prayers don’t do anything to stop them. That’s an interesting thing for a Christian to say, because Christians are mostly supposed to believe that prayers do do anything, even if we mere humans can’t tell exactly what that anything is. A Christian is expected to think that without prayers there would be more mass shootings, or something along those lines. Obama didn’t take the opportunity to say that, and instead he said the opposite. He said the truth, which is that they don’t do anything to stop mass shootings.