May we never witness another mass murder of children and adults like the one perpetrated by 20-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.

The grief of the victims' families is unimaginable. As the mother of three small children who grew up 45 minutes away from the site of the shooting, I couldn't turn on the television or do much of anything over the weekend without crying.

No one wants it to happen again. And no one wants children to be victims-in-waiting at their schools.

As President Barack Obama said Sunday: "We can't accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard?"

The problem is figuring out the right response. Many politicians and pundits wasted no time coming up with solutions.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged Obama to send a gun-control bill to Congress. He wrote in a statement: "Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership -- not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response."

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she planned to introduce an assault-weapons ban the first day of the legislative session in January.

Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera suggested that schools should have armed guards.

Whoa.

As Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote this past weekend, tragedies "are terrible enough in showcasing the evil that men do. But they also regularly bring out the worst in observers, commentators, and pundits who will never let a lack of knowledge or expertise stand in the way of making grand pronouncements."

Those pronouncements sometimes lead to really bad legislation. The USA Patriot Act is a great example of a law that would not have existed without a tragedy. Passed six weeks after 9/11, it made it much easier for the government to spy on citizens and gain access to personal information held by a third party in the name of stopping terrorism. There was virtually no debate on the bill and no opposition from either party because it would have meant being labeled soft on terrorists after 3,000 Americans had just been murdered.

We don't need a similarly rammed-through gun law that politicians feel compelled to vote for out of emotion and peer pressure rather than reason.

Banning so-called assault weapons will not prevent people like Adam Lanza from getting guns any more than current laws stop criminals from buying weapons illegally. A ban does run the risk, however, of giving members of Congress and Americans a false sense of security that the issue is solved and evil can be eliminated through legislation.

Besides, the fact is violent crime is down significantly over the past 20 years even as most states have expanded gun rights. We should not memorialize a terrible loss by "doing something" that neither prevents another Sandy Hook nor solves the malevolence lurking in human nature.