PD Editorial: Once again, children pay for nation's love of guns

“This is catastrophic. There are really no words.”

- Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel

Israel is right of course. There are really no words. There never are.

But what’s particularly unsettling about this shooting, which left 17 people dead in a South Florida high school and at least 15 others wounded Wednesday, is that we know it will come with no actions either. They never do.

No action was taken after two teens went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, killing 13 people and wounding 20 others.

No real changes were made when 32 people were killed by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech University in 2007.

No action was taken when a 20-year-old man armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people - 20 of them children - in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut five years ago. And no action was taken following the nearly 300 school shootings - an average of one a week - that have occurred since.

At this point, we don’t know much about what led to the attack in Broward County. But it doesn’t really matter. We have heard this story before.

Authorities say this rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the handiwork of a 19-year-old man who had been expelled. He came near the end of the school day, armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and “countless” magazines, pulled a fire alarm, put on a gas mask, tossed smoke bombs and began shooting people as they ran through the haze.

Panicked students and staff barricaded themselves as the gunman fired. He was arrested about two hours later, miles from the school.

America is good at arresting gunmen. Where it lacks courage is in arresting gun violence.

How many times do these shootings need to occur before something is done to stop the proliferation of firearms in America, to cease the production of senseless semiautomatic fire power and to prevent such assault weapons from falling into the hands of individuals who see carnage as a form of retribution or some warped sense of self-glorification?

It has reached the point now that school shootings happen without drawing much attention in America. When two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 people were injured in a shooting at a Kentucky school on Jan. 23, the nation tuned in. But many were shocked to learn that it already was the 11th school shooting in America for 2018 - a year that was but three weeks old.

Then, as now, there were no words - and no change. Congressional leaders have proven time and again that they are less concerned with protecting children than they are with preserving a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that holds sacrosanct the right of individuals, even unstable ones, to have seemingly unbridled access to powerful weapons and high-capacity magazines, regardless of the bloodshed that can and often does result.

And no action is likely to occur this time as well, not even the most simple of steps, such as the adoption of a universal background check system, which Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and others have been pushing for years.

Children deserve to be safe at school, but they aren’t. The nation should be outraged, but we’re not. And there really are no words for that.