I think it would be safe to say that very few of political watchers had gun regulation on the radar in the days before the Sandy Hook shootings. Since…well, it’s hard to talk about anything else (and not just because the fiscal cliff story is the least-interesting-and-most-difficult-to-understand-but-perhaps-most-important-story this year).

With that in mind, I asked a couple friends over at PoliticIt to take a look at what trends they saw in social media immediately before and immediately after the Newtown shooting. (PoliticIt, if you’ve not heard of it before, is the brainchild of Josh Light and Sterling Morris. They collect data from social networks, the internet, and “the real world” to create a measure of politicians digital influence that accurately predicts electoral success.)

They showed me some interesting things.