In addition to prayer, aim higher with deeds

Send all the thoughts and prayers you can. But as you’re thinking and praying, ask yourself: How is it that we live in a representative democracy where, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 54 percent of us favor a ban on assault-style weapons, 54 percent support a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips, 66 percent endorse the idea of a federal database to track gun sales, 74 percent want people on federal no-fly or watch lists barred from purchasing guns, 81 percent think people with mental illness should not be allowed to buy guns and 83 percent advocate background checks for private and gun-show sales and yet, the representatives we democratically elect ignore us year after year?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. You already know the answer: We may elect them, after all, but we don’t buy them. The NRA does that.

Here, however, is another question and it isn’t rhetorical at all: Why do we as an electorate let them get away with this? Why do they pay no price at the ballot box? Why do we do nothing? Because we do nothing, Sandy Casey, Charleston Hartfield and Sonny Melton are dead now.

Because we content ourselves with “thoughts and prayers,” Angela Gomez, Jenny Parks and Neysa Tonks are, too.

Because so many of us willingly swallow the lie that the Second Amendment cannot co-exist with reasonable regulation, the next batch of dead is only a matter of time.

“This is the price of freedom,” Bill O’Reilly wrote on his blog.

And seriously, does this look like freedom to you? Freedom is not terror. And free people are not supposed to be helpless to impose change. That’s the point of democracy: The government answers to its voters. But this one apparently does not.

So yes, by all means, send the victims of this latest mass murder your thoughts and prayers.

But your deeds and actions might help, too.