One nation, under the gun

The Supreme Court issued only one opinion Wednesday morning. Fortunately for New York, which is bracing for the activist “conservative” majority to shred the state’s protective gun permitting law, it had nothing to do with firearms. Meanwhile, a 10-minute walk away in the Capitol, Republican political allies of those justices were hewing to their absolutist caricature of the Second Amendment even as a survivor of the Uvalde elementary school massacre and victims’ parents pleaded for some sanity.

There was 11-year-old survivor Miah Cerrillo, saying via video that she witnessed the gunman shoot her teacher in the head, and smeared herself with a friend’s blood to play dead; Kimberly Rubio, mother of murdered Lexi, who spoke of her daughter’s extinguished dreams to attend law school; and Dr. Roy Guerrero, the pediatrician who said he saw children whose “bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.” The brutality of those words is nothing compared to the reality of an assault rifle’s wounds.

Importantly, it was not just agonized Texans who testified, echoing the sentiments expressed powerfully Tuesday at the White House podium by Uvalde-native Matthew McConaughey. Families of victims of the 18-year-old racist who cut down 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket added voices to the excruciating chorus. So did Mayor Adams, who demanded federal action to help stem the daily carnage on our streets, caused not by legal assault weapons but by illegal handguns. Mass shootings may disgust and galvanize the nation, but killings one by one are the bloody norm.

With so many firearms in so many hands, there’s no putting the lethal genie back in the bottle. The best we can hope for is passing meaningful laws curbing access to weapons while working hard to change the culture to make it harder for Americans — mostly angry and unstable and lost young men — to exercise their trigger fingers. Begin now. Now.