The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

A few days after last year’s massacre at Newtown, Conn., we observed: “Every time one of these horrible shooting sprees occurs, countless voices in the media declaim that (1) we need a debate on gun control, and (2) the other side’s views are despicable, stupid and unworthy of consideration.” It’s happening again, in reaction to Monday’s murders at the Washington Navy Yard. But it’s strikingly muted by comparison with the post-Newtown frenzy.

True, “President Obama called on Congress on Tuesday to revisit gun control legislation,” as the Washington Post reports. But he didn’t do it Monday, when he acknowledged the shooting before going on to deliver a hyperpartisan speech on economic policy. Instead:

In an interview with the Spanish-language television network Telemundo, Obama said the country’s background check system for gun buyers is so weak it makes the United States vulnerable to mass shootings, such as the one last December that killed 26 small children [sic; actually 20 children and six adults] at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. “You know, I do get concerned that this becomes a ritual that we go through every three, four months, where we have these horrific mass shootings,” Obama said in the interview. “Everybody expresses understandable horror. We all embrace the families–and obviously our thoughts and prayers are with those families right now as they’re absorbing this incredible loss. And yet we’re not willing to take some basic actions.”

He sounds so weary and resigned. By contrast, he spat fire on April 17, when the Senate voted down the antigun measures he had been pushing since Newtown.

Antigun extremists are exhausted and demoralized. Newtown filled them with rage, which was understandable, but the direction in which they turned it–against lawful gun owners and defenders of the Second Amendment–was not. The effort to incite a moral panic was largely a failure, and nobody seems to have the energy to try it again.

The Daily Caller reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who wasted no time in trying to revive the antigun effort Monday, is reduced to complaining about pestiferous citizens:

“I’m going to have my hair done this morning and there’s somebody outside the salon waiting for me who says, ‘Are you going to try and take our guns away again?’ With, you know, malevolence. It’s that attitude, that, the lack of, I guess, care and concern about the survival of the general public so that somebody can have a house full of weapons.”

Feinstein, like Obama, wants to expand federally required background checks as a precondition for lawful gun purchases. Whatever the merits of such a proposal, in itself or as part of a broader antigun agenda, in the context of the Navy Yard shooting it is a non sequitur.

A background-check system did fail here, but it wasn’t the system for checking gun buyers. As the Washington Post reports, the killer, Aaron Alexis, had “an all-access pass to a half-dozen military installations, despite a history of arrests for shooting episodes and disorderly conduct”:

It is unclear why the Defense Department approved Alexis’s security clearance after his 2004 arrest in Seattle for shooting out the tires of a car. Thomas Richards, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management, said the office conducted only one security review of Alexis, in 2007, and that it turned up his 2004 arrest in Seattle.

He maintained his clearance despite more recent brushes with the law and a pattern of misconduct that preceded his discharge from the Navy. Alexis was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct in DeKalb County, Ga., in 2008, and after he fired a shot into his apartment ceiling in Texas in 2010.

The Hill reports that the Pentagon released an inspector general report yesterday, which “said convicted felons routinely gain access to military facilities like Washington’s Navy Yard”:

The IG report specifically found that 52 felons had received unauthorized access to military facilities for 62 to 1,035 days. It said this had placed “military personnel, dependents, civilians, and installations at an increased security risk.”

It said many facilities did not have enough funds to properly check the backgrounds of contractors.

The Navy did not “follow federal credentialing standards and DOD contractor vetting requirements and did not provide 7 of the 10 installations visited the appropriate resources and capabilities to conduct required contractor background checks,” it said.

You would think a military facility, filled with men under arms, would be a particularly foolish place to carry out a mass shooting. You’d be wrong. As CNSNews.com notes: “Back in 1993, the Clinton administration virtually declared military establishments ‘gun-free zones.’ ” Absent “a credible and specific threat against personnel,” servicemen are not permitted to carry loaded firearms on base. The site quotes the father of a serviceman:

“My son was at Marine Barracks–at the Navy Yard yesterday–and they had weapons with them, but they didn’t have ammunition. And they said, ‘We were trained, and if we had the ammunition, we could’ve cleared that building.’ Only three people had been shot at that time, and they could’ve stopped the rest of it.”

Yet another non sequitur comes from Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, in a blog post yesterday: “It’s been reported that [Alexis] bought his shotgun in Virginia, which is the firearm supermarket of choice on the East Coast.” That is where he bought his shotgun, but Rosenthal’s own paper reports that the killer was unable to buy an AR-15 rifle “because state law there prohibits the sale of such weapons to out-of-state buyers.” …

The curious thing about Rosenthal’s blog post is that so far it’s the only thing his paper has had to say about the Navy Yard shooting. By contrast, its editorial on Newtown went up no later than 4:47 p.m. the day of the massacre. And that editorial was the start (or perhaps the intensification) of a crusade. Many more editorials followed in the ensuing months. Rage would appear to have given way to ennui.

Piers Morgan initially seemed less defatigable, tweeting up a storm on Monday against the AR-15. But on his CNN show that night, he seemed weary too. ThePuffington Host reports that he “brought on three pro-gun advocates to argue with.” But “after tangling over statistics and gun control for 10 minutes, he closed out the segment in frustration.”

He complained: “We have this debate every time. I want the day to come when we don’t have to have this ridiculous debate time and again in America.” Well, doesn’t Morgan have any creative control over his show? Does he just interview whomever his bookers tell him to? Surely if he’d wanted to do an hour of naught but antigun propaganda–or for that matter an hour about a different topic entirely–it was within his power.

Note too that complaining about the debate is not quite the same thing as engaging in it. National Journal reported Monday that “David Frum was quick to pivot to policy and attack pro-gun advocates.” But as a Twitchy.com compilation of his tweets makes clear, he wasn’t talking about policy, and his “attack” was a distinctly passive-aggressive one. He sarcastically laid out “a few simple rules of etiquette” to ensure “that we all respect the feelings of America’s gun enthusiasts.”

Example: “Rule 3: All gun owners are to be complimented as responsible and law-abiding until they personally have hurt themselves or somebody else.” That’s not a compliment; it’s a reasonable presumption, if not a tautology. (Also, it’s worth noting that not only “gun enthusiasts” are put off by Frumian pre-emptive contempt. This columnist, for instance, owns no guns, and we don’t shoot with sufficient frequency to merit the label “enthusiast.” But we like guns and gun people, and we are a U.S. Constitution enthusiast.)

Later in the day, Frum had a brief post at the Daily Beast titled “Let’s Not Wait to Talk About Gun Control.” In other words, his main point isn’t about gun control, it’s abouttalking about gun control. He resents the expectation that he treat his ideological adversaries with respect and that he wait a decent interval before shooting off his mouth on the subject. (But aren’t gun-control people supposed to be in favor of waiting periods?) …

In reality, anyone who has spent time around guns and gun enthusiasts knows that hypervigilance about safety is the defining characteristic of gun culture. Accidents happen, of course; and it’s not impossible to believe that regulatory measures could reduce their incidence. But the antigun extremists are not primarily interested in accident prevention. And of course the Navy Yard shooting was not an accident but the deliberate act of a depraved criminal who was able to multiply the devastation because his victims had been disarmed, and at a military facility no less.

There are fruitful debates to be had about how to prevent mass-shooting atrocities, including by reforming the mental-health system and abolishing “gun-free zones” except in places like airports and courthouses where such bans can be effectively enforced against everyone, not just law-abiding citizens.

Those who are possessed by an irrational hatred of guns and gun owners are unlikely to make much contribution to those debates. But perhaps, having tired themselves out by futilely trying to stir up a panic, they’ll withdraw for a while and leave the field to others of a more practical bent.