My popular response to an aggrieved liberal who used the Arizona shootings as a pretext to argue that a 'gun crazed' America was no longer fit to be a world leader:
"... are you serious? There's been many dumb blog postings in the wake of the shooting, so one couldn't possibly say this is the dumbest, but the audacity of its moronic reach certainly puts it in the running.
Great powers always have and always will embrace violence as a means to an end - this necessary embrace leads to a fascination in violence and this fascination to a sometimes disconcerting fondness for the tools of the trade thereof.
If this makes you uncomfortable, fine, but then that means America as a great power makes you uncomfortable, not just now, but ever, and you should just come right out and say that and admit to the consequences - and then good luck to you and your ilk when whatever great power that rises in its stead not only abuses the 'civilized' norms your refined moral superiority judges acceptable, but disdains them utterly.
Have you never read the personal histories of WWII recipients of the Medal of Honor? By and large they loved their guns and were more or less comfortable about using them to kill people for a purpose they thought just - they may not have been happy about it, and some may have suffered from bad dreams and a troubled life as a result - they all weren't saints and many of them certainly would not have been welcomed into Ivy league faculty lounges - but pretty much every one of them would have been shocked to learn they were uncivilized, gun crazed beasts serving a master that did not deserve the greatness it claimed.
So, not only is your argument seriously flawed as a matter of logic, no doubt because its originating premise suffers from the reactionary simplemindedness of the ideologically offended, but it's also grossly hypocritical if, especially as a Jew but even if only as a democracy loving American, you have ever lauded the republic for the role its free citizens played and the sacrifices they made in undoing one of the greatest wrongs of history... not that I mean with that to indulge in the strident jingoism of the smugly patriotic... the point being that regardless of whatever tenuous virtues pacifism and it's various derivatives may manage within certain contexts, the governance of a great power can have nothing to do with it and to argue otherwise is to engage in delusion, dishonesty or outright ignorance..."
