By Marketplace, October 7, 2019
It was midafternoon on Valentine’s Day when I heard an early news report about the school shooting. The particulars drifted in as I hurried my way through a pile of work that needed attention before I left for a long Florida weekend with my wife: students and teachers killed, number unknown. Panic in the halls. A gunman armed with an assault rifle. My first reaction was: Not again.
I’d found myself thinking that too many times lately. Hadn’t we all? Four months before, a lunatic had barricaded himself in a high-rise Las Vegas hotel, busted out his room’s window, and opened fire on a crowd of thousands gathered below for a country music festival. He’d snuck fourteen AR-15s, a type of assault style rifle, into the hotel. Twelve were fitted with hundred-round magazines. It took him just ten minutes to kill fifty-eight people. Another eight hundred fifty-one — an almost inconceivable number — were wounded by his bullets or in the panic he created.
A month later, a twenty-six-year-old misfit walked into the Sunday service at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and let loose with an assault rifle, killing twenty-six people and injuring another twenty.
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