Is there no limit to our toleration for murdering school children?

A teen is under arrest and two teachers and two students are dead in Georgia

Why?

I don’t know. I did an investigation of the National Rifle Association and its political influences a couple of decades ago and I joined and signed up for lots of stuff so I could find out what they were doing.

Lots of provocative emails at first, then websites and other things as media matured.

I won’t join now. I won’t join ever. And of course, they won’t stop bothering me.

Times have changed a lot, with lots of blood flowing under the dam.

Here’s a fresh piece of news out of Georgia, where a kid with an assault rifle killed 4 people, two teachers and two students. He is charged with murder in the slayings.

Not the first, of course, and I fear, not the last.

The details don’t really matter. The weapon does. Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.

Why do we have such trouble understanding that?

According to a database by USA TODAY, the Associated Press and Northeastern University, Wednesday’s massacre is the 604th mass killing in the U.S. since 2006 in which four or more people are killed. The database has tracked 3,120 fatalities in mass killings across the United States in 18 years.

The massacre in Georgia is the first school mass killing this fall after the 2023-24 school year saw a dramatic rise in shootings with at least 144 instances of gun violence, according to a recent study. Everytown for Gun Safety and David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, found gun violence at schools killed 36 people and injured 87 others in the previous academic year.

The question, as ever, is what are You going to do about it?. No need to send thoughts and prayers, wasted efforts for people who are already dead.

Moving into a heated election cycle, it’s not a bad time to find a way to make guns an issue, once again, just so these slaughters don’t slip out of mind in all the talk about tax cuts and communists and the like. Leave the cynical “no one will ever do anything about it so why bother. “The gun lobby is too strong.”

Maybe that’s only part of it. Maybe we are too weak.

Charlie Madigan was a reporter and editor for 40 years at United Press International and The Chicago Tribune. He lives in Evanston. Read about him at Charlesmadigan.com