More than a dozen shot dead in a South Florida high school on Wednesday. Many more wounded by the gunman.
Mourn though we do, mourn though we must, it is time to admit a painful fact: As a nation, we do not care.
If we cared, we would make at least an honest effort to fight the corrosive culture of violence that infects so many of us.
To attack mental illness as the scourge it is.
Most of all, we would try to change laws that, based on a delusional and suicidal interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, let anyone wield the power to kill in bunches.
In the real world, where we don’t care, the horror stories and the pictures of the dead and wounded will sear our minds and hurt our hearts for a short time.
Then we’ll get ready to do this all over again soon enough.
We have collectively decided this is the way we wish to live. This perverse form of American carnage is not our scourge but our brand.
We have had fair warning. Nearly 19 years ago — before a single one of the student victims in Broward County’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High was born — two young men armed to the teeth murdered 13 and wounded 21 in Columbine.
Over the course of the entire lives of the South Floridian teens now dead and wounded, nothing changed. In fact, it got worse.
A ban on assault weapons then in effect lapsed. Firearms, including those that shoot most rapidly and powerfully, have only become more available, more seductive in the culture. The National Rifle Association’s total stranglehold on our politics has only become more absolute.
And as a nation, we let all this happen.
Which is why, though our stomachs turned, it was no surprise when, just over five years ago, a maniac wielding a military-grade assault rifle murdered 20 first graders and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. When we recovered from our disgust, nothing changed again.
If the lifeless, torn-apart bodies of 6-year-old boys and girls could not shock the American conscience into action, it is pure foolishness to delude ourselves into believing a few more dead and wounded teenagers will do the trick.
Indeed, since that atrocity, guns have torn apart nearly 300 schools — 18 this year alone.
The thing we once called unthinkable has happened nearly 300 times since Sandy Hook.
Three weeks ago, two students were killed and 18 injured in a Kentucky high school. So inured are we to the horror, so perfunctory now is our mourning, it barely registered on the consciousness.
Four and a half months ago, 58 people were murdered in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. For a solid week, the nation mourned. Then, just as quickly, wiped it all away.
Congress and the President, cowards all, could not even bother to ban a device that turned semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic, don’t-even-bother-pulling-the-trigger killing machines.
We might act shocked, but we’re not. Not anymore.
In this, our country, the people who call themselves leaders go through the motions of offering condolences and prayers, then refuse to marshal the smallest iota of courage needed to prevent maniacs motivated by who cares what deranged animus to get ahold of the weapons of their choice.
In this, our country, we force our children to learn how to shelter in place, to endure active shooter drills, to practice lockdowns, engaging in a horrifying modern version of Cold War duck-and-cover exercises.
In this, our country, the enemies are the killers in our midst. But the enemy, in a larger sense, is us.
This is the world we created.
