The list grows: A killer adds dozens more names to a somber national count

The youngest was 5. The oldest, 72.

Among the dead is the pastor's daughter, 14.

The shooter, his own soul among those dispatched Sunday, was 26.

Do their ages matter this time? Does the setting? Does the shooter's race or the races of the victims'?

We will again debate gun control for a few days. We will espouse the merits of dubbing one mass killing an act of terrorism while cautioning ourselves over the detriments of assigning the same label to another.

Devin Kelley might have had more in common with Dylann Roof of the Charleston mass shooting inside a church than he had with Sayfullo Saipov who mowed down eight people in the bike path of a major New York thoroughfare last week.

But are they not all three terrorists?

Kelley is now responsible for the largest number of deaths in a single incident in Texas, but how much does that matter? It didn't seem to add much more than fodder to argue over that Stephen Paddock was responsible for the largest mass shooting in national history.

What is any of it worth discussing now? Nothing -- not one single thing -- will change after this, and why should it. Nothing changed after Charleston, 9; Las Vegas, 50; Aurora, 12; Sandy Hook, 27;  San Bernardino, 14; Orlando, 49.

Nor did anything change in the multiple mass shootings that have occurred between or before any of those, where three, or five or six people were gunned down by a former employee or a man who targeted Sikhs, or by an estranged husband.

If the number of people dead does not matter, nor do their ages or the locations in which they were killed or the reasons for which they were targeted, then what does?

Is it the guns? The cars and trucks? The pipe bombs or pressure cookers? The moving van filled with fertilizer? The hijacked commercial jet?

Maybe it is the religion, the politics, the race, the ethnicity, the nationalism that matter more.

Maybe it's the lack of God or parenting, or it is the overreaching government. Maybe it's mental illness or the lack of funding geared toward it. Maybe it's mankind -- human nature or an aberration thereof. Maybe it's deviancy.

Maybe it's good for ratings, for clicks, for gun and gun permit sales, for special interest group fundraising, for bumper stickers that read you can have my gun when you pull it from ....

Maybe it's fatigue.

What good is debating gun control ---- and if you read this paper often enough, you'll know on which side of that argument we stand, but that's not the point -- what good is gun control when all sides are armed?

What good is outrage when we were all just as upset the last time and nothing of consequence happened after that?

We're all tired of the killing, but more chilling than anything isn't the fact that it is happening more frequently than ever before. It is that we are growing increasingly numb to it in spite of that fact.

Published in Editorials on November 5, 2017 10:29 PM