Shame on Our Routine Response

WASHINGTON -- A confession: When the news of Thursday's mass shooting in Oregon broke, it did not occur to me to write about it.

I was thinking about Planned Parenthood and Benghazi; about Bernie Sanders' fundraising and Hillary Clinton's emails; about Putin and Syria. Another shooting is tragic and enraging, but what is left to say? What is the point of saying anything when it will change no minds?

Still, nothing else was working, so I took the dog for a walk, during which Twitter erupted -- first, with news that the president would be making the inevitable briefing-room statement; next, with the inevitable criticism that he was seizing the moment to change the subject away from the mess in the Middle East. Seriously, he's the president of the United States. If he didn't speak out, he'd be slammed for uncaring silence.

Then the president's grim words shamed me into writing.

"Somehow this has become routine," he noted, bristling with anger and frustration as he made his 15th such remarks. "The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We've become numb to this."

Or perhaps simply despairing. The saddest interview I ever conducted was with three of the mothers whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We sat under the cherry blossoms outside the U.S. Capitol, four months after the killings.

They cried, I cried, as they described the anguish of losing their babies, and the determined lobbying, complete with glossy postcards of their impossibly beautiful murdered children, that had managed to dislodge the usual gridlock and propel a measure to expand background checks for gun purchasers to the Senate floor.

Not to limit the size of ammunition magazines, or to reinstate the assault weapons ban. Just to apply the existing background check requirement to gun shows, in-state gun sales over the Internet and other commercial transactions. Not transfers from fathers to sons, or buddy to buddy. Just commercial transactions.

And even this was too much for the Senate. The tears of grieving mothers could get the measure to the floor but not over the 60-vote threshold -- and, certainly, if the missing six votes had miraculously materialized, not past the House of Representatives.

Since Sandy Hook: The Washington Navy Yard, 12 killed, 3 wounded. Fort Hood, again, 3 killed, 16 wounded. Isla Vista, 6 killed, 7 wounded. Charleston, 9 killed. Now Roseburg, another 9, and "another community stunned with grief," as the president said.

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