Our political Quote of the Day comes from a Washington Post editorial on the Navy yard shootings. It begins:
FOR ALL the unknowns about Monday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, there was a nauseating familiarity to the unfolding events: the witness accounts of chaos and fear; the plea from officials for the public’s help; the number of dead revised upward and then revised upward again.
“We still don’t know all the facts, but we do know that several people have been shot and some have been killed. So we are confronting another mass shooting, and today it happened on a military installation in our nation’s capital,” said President Obama. Another mass shooting. Again, again, again.
It ends:
Life does go on, through Columbine in 1999, through Virginia Tech in 2007, through Sandy Hook in 2012. Each atrocity provides a jolt to the nation and then recedes with little effect, until the next unimaginable event occurs, except each time a little more imaginable. Everything was supposed to change after a man with a semiautomatic weapon mowed down 20 elementary school children in their classrooms last December. But for the politicians, nothing changed. Now, another massacre, another roster of funerals. Again, again, again.
Why doesn’t it change? HERE’S WHY.
*** On gun violence and what do about it: After yesterday’s shooting, the day-after political conversation turns to gun violence. And it was something that Chief Medical Officer Dr. Janis Orlowski, of the Washington Hospital Center, touched on eloquently during her press briefing yesterday. “There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate… There’s something wrong here when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries, there’s something wrong… I’d like you to put my trauma center out of business.” But that inevitably raises the question: How do you legislate that trauma center out of business? Yes, mass shootings are on the rise in the past year — Aurora, Wisconsin, Newtown, and now DC. But in this case, the shooter legally purchased his shotgun in Virginia and then took the other weapons from the police. So what do you do?
What you don’t do is to allow this situation to continue. Which means the likelihood of change — and less work for people in trauma centers on gun wounds — is virtually zilch.
Until something so mind-boggling that brings about change.
(And don’t hold your breath, even then..)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.