"IT MAKES it more poignant that this has happened at Christmas," a radio reporter said to one of the parents at the school in the United States, where 20 infants and six adults were killed by a gunman last week. As banal remarks go, it outstripped the usual "So how do you feel?" question to the unhappy individuals in the vortex of the latest media tornado.

It betrays, of course, something of the sentimental contemporary view of Christmas, which routinely forgets that the child in the manger is born to be crucified. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents is neatly elided in the secular calendar between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve. But the remark speaks of something more disquieting.

Perhaps I am out on a limb here, but I felt a curious sense of unease at the blanket media coverage of the events. There has been a melodrama about much of the writing which is otiose in a situation where the events are dramatic enough without prurient adornment. It feels at times like a self-indulgent paddling in a grief that is too profound for casual journalism to fathom.

That kind of writing might be excusable in the United States, where heartbreaking detail might in some way influence the debate on the politics of gun control. But what we write and read here will change nothing, just as the previous litany of names, such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Batman shooting at Aurora changed nothing. They are just the mass shootings we remember: there were 13 other such attacks in 2012 alone, the Washington Post reports. Each produces the same howls of outrage and the same futile round of arguments as the previous massacre.

In the United States, the House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican party that is deeply in hock to the National Rifle Association (NRA), which vehemently opposes bans on guns with arguments about how this is "more of a mental-health problem than a gun-control problem". Many Democrat poli-ticians acquiesce, fearful that the NRA could oust them.

What makes things even more complex is that most gun legislation is set by states rather than the federal government - and gun shows and the internet are exempt from regulation. British people railing against this, forgetting Dunblane and Hungerford, do little more than assert their own rational and moral superiority over our purblind American cousins.

In the wake of the death of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who took the hoax call about the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, the Samaritans issued an interesting media briefing. Noting strong evidence that copycat suicides occur as a result of extensive press coverage, it counselled against giving too many explicit details - on the method of death, or the contents of any suicide note - and sensationalist reporting. Some of those cautions would be well applied to the horrors at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Grief and bereavement should not be turned into the latest myth, as if they were some newly discovered fairy story by Hans Christian Anderson. Myth was a pre-religious way of making sense of the world, telling stories that help us through adversity by convincing us that the world is not completely random, but has shape and purpose. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents is a revealing theological corollary to the joy of the Christmas story.

But Herod's story is a warning against the cruelty of power, whereas Sandy Hook plunges us only into the sick psychology of derangement. Stories of courage and love in that terrified school were reported, but the primary media fascination was with the lurid detail of the killing, the anguish of the bereaved, and the motivation of the gunman. This offers only a modern parable of existential futility.

We should not hide from the truth, but nor should we wallow in it.

Paul Vallely is associate editor of The Independent.