Mass shooting in Atlanta should compel Washington to act

We have written these words before. America cannot go on like this.

This week, it is Atlanta. Eight people were murdered because a man with hate in his heart decided the solution was a gun and death.

It is a sickness that Annapolis knows from first-hand experience. Five people were murdered in the Capital Gazette newsroom on June 28, 2018, and the consequences of that shooting continue to play out in this community.

Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara and Rob Hiaasen are a testament to the truth of our national crisis.

Each new mass shooting, though, makes clear there are too many guns in this country and that they are too easy to use for evil purposes. We say confidently that while the circumstances may vary between each mass shooting, the underlying crisis is guns.

In Atlanta, the violence targeted Asian American women — a hate crime aimed at women because of their race and gender. In Annapolis, it was a vendetta directed toward people because they worked in journalism.

As happened after the shooting in Annapolis, there will be tears, vigils, speeches and calls for action again.

At this moment, the path for action is clear.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate should say enough is enough, end the filibuster that blocks the passage of widely supported gun violence legislation with a simple majority and begin to chip away at America’s scourge.

The Enhanced Background Checks Act and the Bipartisan Background Checks Act passed the House earlier this month, supported by all Democrats in the Maryland delegation.

One would extend the time for a background check from three to 10 days, called the “Charleston loophole” for the massacre of nine black churchgoers in that city by a white supremacist. The second would end the exemption for firearms obtained through private sales.

While these measures would have a limited effect in Maryland — there is a seven-day waiting period for background checks and a new law is about to take effect closing the exemptions for rifles and shotguns sold in private — guns do not recognize state boundaries.

We know what comes next. After offering thoughts and prayers, Second Amendment advocates will point out that the man arrested in Atlanta doesn’t have any obvious criminal record and bought his gun at a shop, not a show. They pointed out that the man convicted of five murders in Annapolis obtained his gun legally too.

In the thousands of death by guns that occur each year this country by ones and twos, there is a failure to address the method of the madness.

The shooting in Atlanta, like the ones in Newtowne and Parkland and Las Vegas and Annapolis and scores of other cities, will not end until there is an acknowledgment that changing the gun culture will be hard but must come. Removing the filibuster may break the dam holding back that progress.

Republicans in Washington will never address mass murder by firearm unless they have no choice. It is as true today as it was in 2015 after a gunman killed 26 people — 20 of them young children — at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

To the families in Atlanta, our hearts break for you. Days will be tragedies because someone loved is gone. With every new mass shooting, survivors, families and friends of the tragedies that came before will relive their trauma.

We have been through this before. How do we make Atlanta the last mass shooting in America?

There has to be a commitment to address the root cause of these shootings, guns. Ending the filibuster is the step toward that progress that must come next.