John Dickerson of CBS News called it "the pins on America's map of tragedy."
Mass shootings, as Tyler Weyant of Politico wrote, are "America's copy-and-paste tragedy. We change the place, the town, the number of dead and injured. But the constant is lives lost."
New York Governor Kathy Hochul wondered out loud whether she should just keep the American flag at half-staff all the time.
And for the 21st time since a mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif. in 2014, the satirical site The Onion republished its saddest headline:
"No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
We are a sick, sick nation.
How can anyone plausibly argue that the US is the greatest country on earth, the greatest place to live, when any one of us could be shot at any time anywhere. No one is safe. No place in this country is safe.
I feel as though we're living in Biblical times, devoutly worshipping a pagan Gun god and regularly offering up our children and others as a blood sacrifice.
We are more devoted to guns than we are to our children.
We are more committed to ensuring that any violent man can get his hands on as many guns and as many different types of guns as he wants than we are committed to ensuring that our children are safe in school.
After gun massacres such as this, Democrats offer up a boatload of solutions, and Republicans dismissively knock them all down.
But some Dems have decided to stop with the solutions and demand that NRA Republicans offer answers.
So Ted Cruz stepped up and bravely took on ... doors.
Eliminate all doors in school buildings except for one, he proposes. And keep a couple of armed guards at that one door so that when a shooter inevitably shows up, they can well, shoot him.
And if a fire breaks out in that area, and the students and teachers in other parts of the building don't have any doors to use to get out, well, at least they didn't die of gunshots.
Not sure what he'd do about windows. Or school campuses with multiple buildings. Or grocery stories, synagogues, nightclubs, theaters, offices ... you know, basically any building that exists since shooters aren't choosy.
Dense Ted wasn't the only conservative to offer up solutions. Media Matters, a media watchdog site, counted 50 "solutions"that Fox News offered in the 24 hours after the Texas massacre. Spoiler alert: None of them involved controlling guns. Some included:
Armed security guard
Armed school safety officer
Armed deputy
Armed teachers (better do your homework)
Armed administrators
Armed school staffers (don't complain about the cafeteria food; the lunch lady could be packing)
Policemen
Train the students (to do what?!?)
Retired military
Retired law enforcement
Tax breaks
Martial law (somehow I knew they'd go there)
Secure the perimeter
Provide a "ring of steel" (isn't that usually called a fence?)
Better fences
Higher fences
Locked doors
Bulletproof glass (so kids can walk around inside individual, phone-booth like glass bubbles and never sit down)
Judeo-Christian values (okay, now I'm completely confused)
Attacking a school gets a death sentence
School snitches
Put your phone down
Send your kids to private schools
Take your children to church (so at least they'll be praying when they're slaughtered)
Tripwires
God
Address moral rot (I thought the moral rot was infecting the gun worshippers, but what do I know)
Pray
Don't talk about shootings
Ballistic blankets (?)
All right, enough stupidity.
Don't forget Republicans' favorite distracting shiny object: Mental health. It's the favorite bugaboo of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is so convinced of its relevance that last month he slashed $211 million from the Texas office that oversees mental health programs.
I'd like to ask conservative lawmakers who keep touting mental health as the problem to be solved what research they have done to find solutions. As we all know, the US is a stunningly high outlier among other rich, developed countries when it comes to gun violence. For example, the rate of deaths through physical violence by firearms is 100 times higher here than in the UK.
So if mental health is the problem, not guns, then all of these dozens of countries with extremely low gun deaths must have figured out how to handle the mentally ill people in their nations who Republicans claim kill others with guns. (That's not true, but let's play along.)
So, Republicans who claim to care about all of our gun-slaughtered dead, I have a question: What countries have you visited or spoken with to find out how they did it, and what specific programs have they enacted to keep their mentally ill population away from guns?
Hello?
Oh, you haven't? You haven't bothered to do any research, to try to take lessons from other countries that apparently have solved their mental illness problem? Really?
Gee, I wonder why.
I do love it when Republicans smugly point out that other countries don't have a Second Amendment. Oh, then guns actually are the problem here?
It's remarkable that refugees from dangerous countries flee here to escape violence and poverty in their home countries. They must be pretty damned desperate to come here thinking they'll be safe. Maybe they'll smarten up and go to Canada.
Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association is shamelessly holding its national convention in Houston this weekend, 277 miles from the school where 19 little kids and two teachers were killed with an automatic rifle.
Trump will be there, of course, as will Cruz, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, and North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Abbott will address the gathering via a prerecorded video, but his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, canceled his appearance, as did US Senator John Cornyn and US Representative Dan Crenshaw, both of Texas. Four musicians also backed out: Don McLean, Lee Greenwood, Larry Gatlin, and Larry Stewart.
None of those who canceled have changed their positions on guns, of course; they just realize it kind of looks bad to be celebrating guns and partying as undertakers a few hundred miles away are preparing what's left of those destroyed little bodies for funerals.
On this Memorial Day, please remember our new war dead.
