God Bless America -

God Bless America -
There’s the right to bear arms, sure, but there’s also the right to walk into a nightclub or a concert
— or to send a child off to school — without a sense of dread that’s increasingly and fully warranted.
God bless America,” our president said, dutifully, after the bloody Sunday in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas was one of the worst but hardly the first.
House Speaker Paul Ryan responded to the horror in Las Vegas by saying
that “what truly defines us” are the acts of heroism we learned of, while the shooting itself “is not who we are.” How does he figure that?
The second article was by Steve Israel, a former congressman,
and its transcendent point was in its terrifying headline: “Nothing Will Change After the Las Vegas Shooting.” That’s an outrageous forecast.
God bless America, whose partisan fevers are so corrosive
that when the musician Caleb Keeter tweeted that his presence in Las Vegas on Sunday had shown him “how wrong” he was to oppose gun control, critics aplenty assailed the selfishness of the epiphany.
God bless America, where the fact that we can’t be 100 percent sure
that a given new gun restriction would lessen the dying becomes an excuse not to give it a try, though the stakes couldn’t be higher, the sirens couldn’t be louder and each new marker surpasses the last.