It’s a day later and I am seething. How do you, as a journalist, write the same story over and over again? How do you as a human being look at the faces of more dead children and teachers, hear about what might have been, and not say this has to stop? How do you as a politician continue to mouth empty words about “thoughts and prayers” and reach your hand out for the blood-soaked money of the NRA?
I have nothing more to say that hasn’t been said countless times before, that I myself haven’t said countless times before. My heart is broken, and it will be undoubtedly be broken again. My mind shutters at the craven futility of a political establishment that, at least for now on the national level, is completely fine with doing nothing of any real consequence.
The unimaginable can, with enough frequency of experience, become imaginable, and then commonplace, and then no big deal? Time to move on? Well, not me. I mark each of these tragedies as acts that diminish our nation and our humanity. I believe, in the end, the vast majority of my fellow Americans feel the same way.
I don’t know what the solution is. We need to try many things. We need to understand that not all will succeed. But gun violence, and not just school shootings, is a public health scourge of epidemic proportions. It is a real and present danger to the security of the United States and its people. And it seems that the first step for any treatment of this plague will have to come at the ballot box.