When a disturbed young man named Cho Seung-Hui murdered more than 30 fellow students and faculty members at Virginia Tech, it took only a matter of hours for the killings to become fodder for political debate. Gun control advocates argued that the shootings proved the need for stricter firearm regulation.

In the Daily News, columnist Michael Daly wrote: “Still love those guns, Virginia? Ready to admit that it’s madness for any psycho to be able to saunter into a gun shop and acquire firepower capable of killing 32 innocents? Feel different now that the blood is the blood of so many of your most promising young people?”

Second Amendment partisans countered that if the school hadn’t been a “gun-free zone,” the killer might have been stopped sooner. Noting that a number of similar gunmen have been neutralized by armed civilians, Neal Boortz wrote: “[E]arlier this year the Virginia General Assembly failed to act on [a bill that] would have allowed college students and employees to carry handguns on campus — with appropriate permits, of course.” It died in subcommittee. Larry Hincker, a spokesman for Virginia Tech … said, “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

Well … how’s today for safety?

If it had been legal for students, employees, or faculty members with permits to carry guns on the campus, is it at all possible that there might be some students alive today who didn’t make it through the carnage?

These reactions were predictable. At the same time and equally predictable, others decried the efforts by both sides to “politicize” the shootings by using them as ammunition for arguments on either side of the firearms debate. This view resonated with many who believe that tragic events like the Virginia Tech massacre are demeaned when they are appropriated as weapons in a political argument.

In general, there is nothing wrong with “politicizing” an issue. This is a democracy, and politics is the process we use to resolve conflicts. Important issues of legitimate public concern should be “politicized,” that is to say, debated publicly and resolved democratically. When a political group says that an issue shouldn’t be “politicized,” it generally means that it is on the losing side of the political argument.

Nor is there anything wrong with using a tragedy to support a political argument. It happens all the time, and should. Thus, for example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 employees lost their lives, was a major impetus for improved fire safety regulation.

In recent years, tragedies of all sorts have been enlisted, rightly or wrongly, in the political arguments of the day. Hurricane Katrina, for instance, gave rise to endless criticisms of the Bush administration’s response to the disaster. Few, if any, voices in the press argued that the tragedy of the hurricane should not be politicized.

It is understandable, too, that advocates on both sides of the gun control issue are in a hurry to make their points: their lessons can be drawn most effectively when the events are fresh. After a few days, public attention will move on to something else.

Still, the rush to draw gun-control conclusions from the Virginia Tech murders is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it is unseemly. While this or any other tragedy can be a legitimate topic of political debate, having that discussion while bodies are still being carried out of the building conveys an impression of trying to capitalize on the emotion of the moment — which is, of course, just what the partisans on both sides are trying to do.

The gulf between left and right is deep, but perhaps not so deep as the divide between the political and the apolitical. The apolitical majority instinctively believes that the human dimension of an event like the Virginia Tech murders is entitled to priority over the political hay that can be made over it. Partisans would do well to acknowledge that priority by holding their fire until the initial sense of horror has passed.

The second reason why the rush to draw political lessons from the Virginia Tech massacre is premature is that we don’t yet know the facts of the case. The day after the murders, the New York Times asserted, “What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.” But the paper’s conclusion was negated by its own admission that: “Not much is known about the gunman, who killed himself, or about his motives or how he got his weapons, so it is premature to draw too many lessons from this tragedy.”

It is, indeed, premature. There will be plenty of time, next month and next year, to talk about whether and how the tragedy at Virginia Tech bears on the issue of firearms regulation. But any arguments that can be made logically in that regard will depend on a better understanding of the crime: of the murderer, his weapons and how he obtained them; his motives and whether they could have been foreseen; his methods and how they could have been best defended against.

Until the facts are clear, the conventional view that one should not make political fodder out of human tragedy will contain more than a grain of truth.

Mr. Hinderaker is a lawyer in Minneapolis and writes at powerlineblog.com.