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Clarence Page: It’s hard to not lose hope over mass shootings

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

I’m really getting tired of writing about mass shootings.

I’m not alone in my weariness. Back in the final summer of Barack Obama’s presidency, he sounded the same weary tune in 2015 following the shooting at an Oregon community college.

“Somehow this has become routine,” he said. “The reporting has become routine. My response here, from this podium, has become routine.”

But, alas, it had not become too routine for him to have to do it at least 14 times in his two terms in office.

That same sense of gloom came to my mind Monday after a young man opened fire at the Highland Park Independence Day parade, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 30 others.

Unlike Chicago to the south, where 71 people were shot, at least eight fatally, over the holiday weekend, killings are very rare in Highland Park, the sort of suburb where people move to flee big-city problems — if they can afford it.

 

As people lamented how “you don’t expect this sort of thing” in Chicago’s affluent north suburbs, I was reminded grimly of the last time I heard those sentiments — back in 1988, when a mentally ill Laurie Dann fatally shot an 8-year-old boy and wounded several other children in a Winnetka elementary school.

On Monday, Robert E. Crimo III used a high-powered rifle he purchased legally in the state and left at the crime scene, authorities said. More firepower than Dann had led to more casualties — less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it must be more difficult for states to place restrictions on guns.

Setbacks like that help explain why I have grown exceedingly weary of writing about mass shootings and the need to develop a sane national gun-safety policy.

Not that we haven’t seen any progress at all. Late last month, President Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation to be passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. The measure came just over a month after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school left 19 children and two adults dead, an attack that came 10 days after a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket led to the deaths of 10 Black people.

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(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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