How many more times do we have to mourn people - especially children - killed in mass shootings by unbalanced individuals with automatic rifles meant to be used in war?
The school shooting Wednesday in Parkland, Fla., that killed at least 17 people, mostly high-school students, was America's 18th school shooting - and the 30th mass shooting - so far this year.
It's only February.
The suspected shooter, a 19-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the shooting took place, bought his AR-15 legally. He'd been a problem student, expelled at more than one school and described by fellow students after the shooting as odd, troubled, an outcast. On social media, he posted more than once that he wanted to kill people, and in one post said he wanted to become "a professional school shooter." Some of his posts were so threatening he was twice reported to the FBI.
Politicians and pundits are saying all the usual things. It's too early to talk about laws or guns. We can't legislate mental stability. It was the fault of evil. Our thoughts and prayers ...
Well, we're sick of it. And we're sure you are, too.
There's is no excuse for the fact that we live in the most powerful and richest country on earth, yet we are completely complicit in allowing the gun lobby and its blood money to take our children, our sisters, our brothers, our mothers and our fathers in mass shootings almost every day.
We've seen a mass shooting roughly every day and a half in the first 45 days of 2018. If you count only gun violence - minus the "mass shooting" part - someone is fatally shot every 15 minutes in our "law and order" country.
And if the answer is more guns, as the NRA and gun pushers would have us believe, then why is it that America, with more than 300 million guns - roughly one for every citizen - also has one of the highest gun-death rates in the developed world?
More Americans have died from gun violence, including suicides, since 1970 (about 1.4 million) than in all the wars in American history going back to the Revolutionary War.
Evil didn't make this 19-year-old or any other shooter take deadly aim at students, or worshipers, or country-music fans or any of our recent mass shootings. Nor did evil sell those shooters their guns.
Evil doesn't make our Congress cower before the National Rifle Association and its massive gun lobby. Evil doesn't pry our lawmakers' arms from prayerful clasps to hold out their hands for the gun industry's blood money.
Evil, nearly a year ago, didn't make Congress pass and President Donald Trump sign a law revoking an Obama-era regulatory initiative that would have made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun.
To borrow a line from the gun lobby, evil doesn't kill people. People with guns, enabled by the gun lobby and our government, do.