Bodies & empty words

violence - DO SOMETHING.”

As always, all the politicians who are as scared of crossing the NRA as they would be of a gun pointed at them on a street corner in the night, want this to be about everything except the gun. They want it to be about isolation and mental illness and everybody missing all the signs that another teenager, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was about to come through the door of a school and start shooting. And of course all of those things are factors when this kind of gun violence occurs again. But the one unchanging part of this is the gun, in a country where there are more guns in circulation than there are citizens, in a country where you’re supposed to believe that the real threat is an illegal immigrant coming across a border.

All across this country on Friday afternoon, in our city and in cities and towns all across America, children returned home from school in the afternoon. Buses brought them home, or parents brought them home, or high school kids drove cars home. It is a predictable pageant of life in this country, as another school year comes to an end. And once, in a country so less lousy than it is now with guns, there was no reason not to trust that those children would return home after leaving for school in the morning. Only now in America, it feels like some kind of lottery.

More didn’t make it home from high school on Friday. That is the real pageant of school life in Gun America in 2018. That is the way the school year ends in Santa Fe, Tex.