Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Opinion Today: Enough.

The screams of American parents who have lost their children to school shootings continue.
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By Kathleen Kingsbury

Opinion Editor

Once, the parents of 20 children were gathered into the back of a firehouse and told that their kids were dead, The Times reported. Their screams could be heard outside.

That was a decade ago in Newtown, Conn. Those screams haven't faded. They've joined an ever louder, ever growing chorus.

Their number swelled again Tuesday, joined in grief by the families of at least 19 more children in Uvalde, Texas. Two adults were also killed.

Some 84 percent of American voters support universal background checks. Yet enough federal lawmakers are content with the status quo on gun safety — content with things as they are. And so they do not change.

"This is the blunt, damning truth: The latest shooting was 100 percent predictable," my former colleague Nicholas Kristof wrote in a column entitled "How to Reduce Shootings" in the wake of a 2017 church shooting that left 26 people dead. Year after year — sometimes week after week — Times Opinion has updated Nick's column, as we did last night. We'd like never to do so again.

But to be American is to live among guns. The government simply won't do what the people are begging it to do — and dying for, when it does not act. That is a tragedy for the security of our nation's schoolchildren, and for our democracy.

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