President Obama couldn’t resist exploiting the deaths in Charleston to advance the gun control agenda, and he has a lot of company in the Democratic Party, which is desperate to energize its voters as the 2016 election looms with a very unappealing presumptive nominee at the top of the ticket.  Make no mistake, they are going to emotional, not rational appeals.

The mentality that sees guns, not humans, as the problem leads to a number of absurdities. We can thank Robert Shrum, a hardball-playing Democrat campaign consultant who has worked on the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, for blatantly exposing the stupidity underlying the gun grabbing mentality. Valerie Richardson reports in the Washington Times:

It’s hard to imagine how the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church that left nine dead could have been worse, but a top Democratic strategist says the shooting would have been a “horror” if the black parishioners were armed.

“Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,” said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”

“You might not even have three survivors,” said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential bid.

Somehow, in the mind of Shrum, people returning fire would be worse than being mowed down defenselessly. Apparently, guns have a will of their own, so more guns equals more people hurt. There are no good guys or bad guys, only people with guns, so the more guns, the worse things are.

This is non-judgmentalism gone mad. It is very easy to imagine what would have happened if one or more parishioners had been armed. Roof would have been wounded or killed before he could murder more than one or two of the innocents. We can allow for the possibility of poor aim, so maybe an innocent person would have been harmed by the return fire. But the systematic slaughter would not have taken place, especially since Roof had to reload.

Shrum is a man who makes his living by motivating Democrat voters, so we have to assume he spoke on the basis of some knowledge of how their minds work. But arguing in favor of passivity and defenselessness in the face of evil is simply insane.

The Second Amendment is one of our civil rights. The appalling slaughter in Charleston ought to be a reminder of how important it is.