Our high school killing fields

It is always easy, and big fun, to make fun of the royals in England, and the kind of high church and high ceremony we witnessed Saturday at Windsor Castle when Prince Harry married Meghan Markle. Weddings like that, as infrequently as they occur, are all theirs. In this country, we do funerals for schoolchildren.

Oh, sure. We do funerals for schoolkids better than anybody in the world, the way we do mass shootings better than anybody else in the civilized world.

So now there will be more funerals for more dead high school kids, the ones who did not make it home from Santa Fe High School on Friday because a 17-year-old walked through the door with a shotgun and a .38 that he had taken from his father, in a gun-friendly state where there is no law about keeping firearms locked up.

We will do eight more funerals for students in Santa Fe, Texas, and two for teachers. We will do them three months after we buried 14 students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after a Valentine’s Day gun massacre there.

Texas is the same state where they held the annual National Rifle Association convention a couple of weeks ago. We know what President Trump told the crowd at the NRA convention about not letting anybody take any of their guns, even as he now says his administration will do anything and everything to stop school shootings. We know about how empty that promise sounds and how empty the prayers from Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, sound after the shooting at Santa Fe High, Pence being another leader of the NRA pep squad.

Neither Trump nor Pence will be officially on any ballot this November. But Sen. Ted Cruz, in whose state the Santa Fe shooting occurred Friday morning, sure is.

Cruz is always the first to step forward and talk about prayer in the wake of another school shooting, even as he is always one of the first and loudest to attack any Democrats in the Senate when they want to talk about any kind of gun control. It is why there is no bigger phony in the current political culture than he is.