The Hard Truth: Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear - By Charles M. Blow Opinion Columnist

The Hard Truth: Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear

May 29, 2022, 3:00 p.m. ET

Eric Thayer/Getty Images

“I find that the gun safety debate lacks candor.

People believe it is savvier to tell only part of the truth, to soft-pedal the sell in an effort to get something — anything — done.

But lying will always lead to a trap.

Let me explain: The truth that no one wants to tell — the one that opponents of gun safety laws understand and the reason so many of them resist new laws — is that no one law or single package of laws will be enough to solve America’s gun violence problem.

The solution will have to be a nonstop parade of laws, with new ones passed as they are deemed necessary, ad infinitum. In the same way that Republicans have been promoting gun proliferation and loosening gun laws for decades, gun safety advocates will have to do the opposite, also for decades.

Individual laws, like federal universal background checks and bans on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, will most likely make a dent, but they cannot end gun violence. Invariably, more mass shootings will occur that none of those laws would have prevented.

Opponents of gun safety will inevitably use those shootings to argue that the liberal efforts to prevent gun violence were ineffective. You can hear it now: “They told us that all we needed to do was to pass these laws and the massacres would stop. They haven’t.”

That said, I understand the by-any-means-necessary approach that gun safety advocates are taking. They would do anything to make progress on this issue, to save even one life, one group of shoppers in a grocery store, one classroom full of children.

I share their exasperation. This week I found myself thinking that I was happy my children are no longer of school age. The idea that a parent would have to worry about their children being shot down at school is unimaginable and unconscionable. The fact that children now have active shooter drills and bulletproof backpacks is obscene.

I know all too well the numbing feeling of seeing no progress as the slaughter spreads. It can breed in us a perpetual despair and desperation.

But I chose to view this issue soberly, with clear eyes, understanding the hurdle to getting anything done, but also not lying to myself about just how much would need to be done for more Americans to feel truly safe.

I understand that Republicans are the opposition, that they have come to accept staggering levels of death as the price they must pay to advance their political agenda on everything from Covid to guns.

But I am on the same page as they are on one point. They see the passage of gun safety laws as a slippery slope that could lead to more sweeping laws and even, one day, national gun registries, insurance requirements and bans. I see the same and I actively hope for it.

When I hear Democratic politicians contorting their statements so it sounds like they’re promoting gun ownership while also promoting gun safety, I’m not only mystified, I’m miffed.

Why can’t everyone just be upfront? We have too many guns. We need to begin to get some of them out of circulation. That may include gun buybacks, but it must include no longer selling weapons of war to civilians.

I grew up in a gun culture. If there was a family in my hometown that didn’t have guns, I didn’t know them. One of the required projects in shop class was the making of a gun rack. My own home was filled with guns, and at one point we even had a gun case with a carousel for the long guns in the living room.

Almost no one in my town needed those guns. We weren’t active hunters. Crime wasn’t raging. We were probably safer without them than with them.

Furthermore, people rarely, if ever, practiced shooting. Some guns were owned without ever being fired. People owned guns and had no idea what it felt like to fire them.

Gun culture is a canard and a corruption.

It makes people fearful and convinces them that guns provide security. More guns equate to even more security. But in fact, the escalation of gun ownership makes society less safe.

In our gun culture, 99 percent of gun owners can be responsible and law abiding, but if even 1 percent of a society with more guns than people is not, it is enough to wreak absolute havoc. When guns are easy for good people to get, they are also easy for bad people to get.

We have to stop all the lies. We have to stop the lie that fewer gun restrictions make us safer.

And we have to stop the lie that gun safety can be accomplished by one law or a few of them rather than an evolving slate of them.“

States Rush Toward New Gun Restrictions as Congress Remains Gridlocked

May 29, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ETMay 29, 2022

A memorial for the students and teachers who were killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times

“SACRAMENTO — Congress failed to impose gun restrictions after the school massacres in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla., and there’s little confidence that 21 deaths at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, will change matters now.

But states aren’t waiting.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy urged lawmakers to advance firearms safety measures, including raising the age to 21 for purchases of long guns and exposing gun makers to civil lawsuits.

In New York — where an 18-year-old in Buffalo was charged two weeks ago with committing a racist mass shooting — Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would seek to ban people under 21 from purchasing AR-15-style rifles.

And in California — where a politically motivated mass shooting erupted at a luncheon of older churchgoers this month — legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom fast-tracked tougher controls on firearms.

“We are getting a lot of inquiries even though a lot of state legislatures are out of session,” Nico Bocour, director of government affairs for the anti-gun-violence group Giffords, said after the Uvalde shooting. “In the wake of a lot of inaction by Congress, states want to step up and keep people safe.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paying her respects to the lives lost in the shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo this month.Doug Mills/The New York Times

In Republican-controlled statehouses, however, the moves evoked an equal and opposite reaction. A day after Uvalde, rural conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan beat back Democratic attempts to force votes on long-blocked gun safety legislation.

And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican officials blamed the school massacre on a gunman with mental health problems, not gun laws. They accused Democrats of politicizing the situation with calls for gun control.

“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” Mr. Abbott said a day after the Uvalde shooting.

The state actions come as hope for congressional consensus has waned to a flicker, not only on gun violence, but on an array of American social issues. As polarized politics repeatedly trump compromise in a narrowly divided Congress, liberal and conservative states have enacted disparate and often opposing agendas, erecting a patchwork of policies on a range of issues, including abortion and civil rights.

Since 2019, federal legislation to expand criminal background checks for gun purchases has twice passed the House only to languish amid Senate Republican opposition. On Thursday, a small, bipartisan group of senators said they would work through the weekend in a search for common ground.

“We beg you,” a group of school principals who survived past campus shootings wrote in a letter that was expected to appear as a full-page ad in The Washington Post on Sunday. “Do something. Do anything.”

But as they publicly mourned the tragedy in Uvalde, Republican senators showed scant signs that they had budged. And few believe that gridlocked Washington will accomplish much after seeing the same script play out before. The one modest proposal that seemed to show promise would kick decisions to statehouses: It would offer incentives for states to pass “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who are mentally ill.

Roughly three in five state legislatures are Republican-controlled, but calls for action on gun violence have run high in the aftermath of Uvalde’s devastation. In Texas, where the National Rifle Association went ahead with a scheduled convention three days after the school shooting, the issue surfaced almost immediately in the governor’s race.

As authorities were still processing the crime scene, former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke — who is challenging Mr. Abbott — interrupted the governor’s news conference to charge that the Republican had “done nothing” to protect Texans from gun violence.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke interrupted a news conference following the shooting when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed the massacre on a mental health crisis.Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images

“Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state,” Mr. O’Rourke called to audience members as he was escorted from the gathering, “or they will continue to be killed.”

Last year, Texas passed a law allowing virtually anyone over the age of 21 to carry a handgun without a permit, making it the most populous among nearly a dozen states that have shunned most restrictions on the ability to carry handguns.

Mr. Abbott was scheduled to appear at the N.R.A. convention in Houston before deciding instead to send a video address and travel to Uvalde. But the state’s Republican officials seemed disinclined to tighten gun laws.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that, instead of restricting guns, school security and mental health care should be improved. But there remain serious questionsabout whether popular school-based security measures work against mass shootings, particularly when the attacker uses high-powered weapons. And in the Uvalde shooting, the school district had its own police force and school shooting plan, while the gunman was apparently never flagged for mental illness.

Nationally, a majority of Americans have supported stricter gun laws for decades, polls show. A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted this week showed overwhelming support among Americans for background checks, a ban on assault-style weapons and other gun restrictions.

But spikes in demand for gun control that occur after mass shootings also tend to revert to the partisan mean as time passes. The same poll also reported that a slim majority of Americans support arming teachers — a solution touted this week by the Gun Owners of America.

America’s long, bitter fight over guns has hardened lines to the point that refusing to compromise on the Second Amendment has become part of the identity of the Republican Party. The United States Supreme Court’s rightward shift on hot-button cultural issues has further emboldened Republican legislatures to pass conservative social policies once viewed as too extreme by courts and Congress — and prompted Democratic-led states to respond in kind.

After the Supreme Court in December preserved a Texas law encouraging private lawsuits against anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, California’s governor proposed parallel legislation to incentivize lawsuits against anyone who traffics in banned firearms.

At the time, Mr. Newsom’s social media call was seen as an impulsive retort that lawmakers weren’t sure whether to take seriously, as it came on a Saturday evening and ran counter to his previous view of the Constitution. It is now the foundation for the California bill that has drawn the most attention this week.

Also this week, a federal court upheld a New York law — the first of its kind in the nation — allowing civil lawsuits to be filed against firearm manufacturers and dealers. Passed last year, it is aimed at circumventing the broad immunity long enjoyed by gun companies. Other states have expressed interest, including New Jersey, where Governor Murphy called for a similar law last month.

But Republicans may look to other courts, particularly the Supreme Court, to block state laws on gun control after former President Donald J. Trump appointed a wave of conservative federal judges. This month, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a state ban on sales of semiautomatic rifles to adults under 21 was unconstitutional.

Despite that decision, Governor Hochul announced Wednesday that she would seek to prevent people “not old enough to buy a legal drink” from purchasing AR-15-style rifles.

“We are not only leaning heavily on state legislatures now, but we have been for the past 10 years, particularly since the Sandy Hook massacre,” said Rebecca Fischer, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, referring to the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown that killed 26 people. “Strategically, we understood as advocates that we needed to be working with our state legislators to see real change, and that is where there has been most meaningful change.”

On Thursday evening, people gathered at Trinity Episcopal Church in Newtown, Conn., for a vigil offering solidarity with those in Uvalde, Texas, the scene of this week’s mass shooting at an elementary school.Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Research indicates that California’s approach has constrained gun deaths.

The state’s rate of firearm mortality is among the nation’s lowest, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, compared to 14.2 per 100,000 in Texas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A more recent analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Californians were about 25 percent less likely to die in mass shootings, compared to citizens of other states.

Even so, New York and other states pursuing strict gun laws are, in many ways, hampered by the lack of a coherent gun policy from Congress and the flow of illegal firearms from states with looser laws. Research shows that gun crimes in states with tough restrictions are often committed with firearms from more permissive states.

“California leads this national conversation,” Mr. Newsom said in the State Capitol alongside Democratic state lawmakers. “When California moves, other states move in the same direction.”

Meet Francia Márquez, the Afro-Colombian Land Defender Running to Be Colombia’s First Black VP | Democracy Now!

Meet Francia Márquez, the Afro-Colombian Land Defender Running to Be Colombia’s First Black VP | Democracy Now!

After 21 people were killed, the Republican party’s newest enemy is … doors | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

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Harris, other mourners in Buffalo call for action on gun violence

Vice President Harris hugs Robin Harris, daughter of shooting victim Ruth E. Whitfield, during her funeral at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Buffalo on May 28. (Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)

Vice President Harris hugs Robin Harris, daughter of shooting victim Ruth E. Whitfield, during her funeral at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Buffalo on May 28. (Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)

BUFFALO — The final victim of the racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket has been laid to rest.

The solemn occasion on Saturday celebrating the life of Ruth E. Whitfield, the 86-year-old matriarch of her family, was the last funeral for the 10 victims of the May 14 attack allegedly carried out by 18-year-old Payton Gendron. Authorities say he drove more than three hours and targeted the Tops grocery store in the heart of Buffalo with the intent of killing Black people.

A 600-page document attributed to the shooter goes into great detail about how he chose the Buffalo supermarket after researching other locations around New York state, including in Syracuse and Rochester.

Since the shooting, many Black Buffalonians have been in fear of going into public places like stores, wondering whether an attack might happen here again.

The shooting, which horrified the nation just two weeks ago, seems to have been quickly overshadowed by another senseless mass shooting, the massacre in Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday. But to the community here, the service also served as a call to action, full of desperate pleas for lawmakers to put measures in place to prevent more gun violence.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump urged legislators to take up gun-control measures during his blistering speech. He repeatedly returned to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s calls to stand up to evil when you see it in the world.

“We cannot condone evil,” Crump said. “We must protest evil.”

Vice President Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, also attended services after meeting privately with Whitfield’s family.

On May 28 Vice President Harris added the country was experiencing an “endemic pain” during remarks at a memorial for victims of the May 14 Buffalo shooting. (Video: The Washington Post)

“We will not allow small people to create fear in our communities,” Harris told the crowd of more than 400 people at Mount Olive Baptist Church, about two miles from the site of the killing.

How residents of Buffalo's East Side face racism every day

Whitfield was remembered as an anchor by her family, including her son, former Buffalo fire commissioner Garnell W. Whitfield, his three siblings and throngs of mourners.

Garnell Whitfield told a story about how, as a Mother’s Day gift, he built his mother a raised garden bed in the days leading up to the attack. She asked him whether he was going to use it to grow vegetables after she was gone, he recalled.

“She was telling me, ‘Leave that box alone,’” Whitfield said. “… She wasn’t trying to grow seeds in that box. She had been tending her seeds all her life. That fruit had ripened. It had matured.”

While the mood of the service was celebratory, many of the speakers also viewed the funeral as an opportunity to address important issues of systemic racism that exist in Buffalo and beyond. The Rev. Al Sharpton urged mourners to use the deaths of the Buffalo 10, as the victims have come to be called, as motivation to continue to push for laws that will prevent the next racist shooting.

“We’re going to build a new Buffalo in the name of these 10,” Sharpton said. “We want economic development right here in Buffalo.”

10 years of failure on gun control

Outside, after the service was over, politicians from around the state joined Crump and Sharpton to continue calling for more action on gun laws and pushing for further economic development in the city’s East Side.

The Tops supermarket where the attack occurred is the only full-service market in the city’s predominantly Black East Side, and was a hard-won victory when it opened in 2003, the result of years of advocacy from neighborhood activists. Food access remains scarce in the neighborhoods east of Main Street.

Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes (D), the New York State Assembly majority leader and a lifelong East Side resident, pressed her Republican colleagues in the legislature to take up laws that could help to prevent gun violence.

“I don’t want your thoughts or your prayers,” Peoples-Stokes said. “I want action. I need you to stop opposing opportunities to get guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”

Mayor Byron Brown (D) said he too will continue to push lawmakers at every level.

“We will not be silent on that,” Brown said. “We will work in a collective fashion to hold the lawmakers in Washington that refuse to act and the gun manufacturers who put profit over the sanctity of human life — we will hold them accountable.”

Vice President Harris on May 28 called for an assault weapons ban following back-to-back mass shootings. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Malik Rainey/Bloomberg/The Washington Post)

Before boarding a plane back to Washington, Harris urged legislators to impose a ban on assault weapons.

“I will say as I’ve said countless times, we are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like,” she said in comments to the media. “You know how an assault weapon was designed? It was designed for a specific purpose: to kill a lot of human beings quickly.”

After 21 people were killed, the Republican party’s newest enemy is … doors | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

Can I Stop Isolating If I’m Still Testing Positive for the Virus?

“Some people may test positive for the coronavirus for 10 days or longer, but interpreting those results remains difficult, experts said.

May 29, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET

Rapid antigen tests have become useful tools for flagging people carrying high levels of the virus, but they are not perfect predictors of infectiousness. Danielle St. Laurent for The New York Times

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus moves fast. Symptoms typically appear just a few days after infection, with viral levels peaking less than five days after the pathogen first becomes detectable.

But for some people, the virus seems to linger, with at-home tests coming back positive day after day, even after other people in the household return to work or school. So why do some people test positive for the virus for 10 or 12 or even 14 days — and are they still infectious after so long?

“It’s a great question — it’s one that I get asked all the time,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.

It is also one without an easy answer. Although rapid antigen tests, which detect proteins on the outside of the coronavirus, can flag people carrying high levels of the virus, they are not perfect predictors of infectiousness.

Studies suggest that while most people stop testing positive on antigen tests sometime during the first 10 days of their illnesses, a notable subset of people continue to test positive for longer, for reasons that scientists do not entirely understand.

In some cases, these people may still be shedding infectious virus, but in others, the tests may be picking up viral debris from a waning infection, experts say, making it difficult to know how to interpret the results.

“Some people may not be infectious at the end of their course even if still antigen-positive, whereas others may be infectious even if antigen-negative,” said Dr. Yonatan Grad, an immunologist and infectious disease expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Indeed, scientists disagreed on the best course of action for people who test positive for more than 10 days. While some say that the most prudent path is to continue to isolate, others argue that prolonged isolation is unnecessary for most otherwise healthy people.

Given the uncertainty, some experts have advised that test results at the end of an infection be viewed as just one potentially useful piece of information considered in concert with other factors, including a patient’s symptoms and immune status. Along those lines, Dr. Chin-Hong recommended “using the rapid test as a guide but not the be-all and end-all.”

What we know

Studies conducted before the emergence of Omicron demonstrated that people with Covid-19 were most likely to spread the virus in the few days before and after developing symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited these findings when explaining its decision to shorten its isolation guidelines late last year. While the old guidelines recommended that patients isolate for 10 days, the current recommendations say that many people can leave isolation after five days, although they should wear a mask through Day 10.

Research also suggests that rapid antigen tests are most likely to be positive early in the course of illness, but there is considerable variation.

According to a new analysis of people who sought repeat testing at a California site during the Omicron wave, an estimated 71 percent were antigen-positive four days after their symptoms appeared or after they first tested positive for the virus. That percentage declined over the following days, but an estimated 20 percent were still positive on Day 11, according to the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.

“For some people, they’re seeing fairly prolonged courses of being antigen-positive,” Dr. Grad said. “I think we chalk it up to some variation in people’s immune system and ability to respond to infection and clear this virus.”

Indeed, a pair of recent studies, neither of which has been reviewed by experts, suggest that some people with Omicron infections shed infectious virus — capable of replicating in a “cell culture,” or a dish of live cells in the laboratory — for more than a week.

“That’s a pretty good indication that they’re likely to be infectious,” said Dr. Amy Barczak, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, who found that 25 percent of people still had viable virus on Day Eight or beyond.

In the other study, which enrolled vaccinated students and staff at Boston University, researchers found that while most participants no longer had positive viral cultures six days after their symptoms began, a small number had viable virus as late as Day 12.

What we don’t know

Scientists are not sure why some people test positive longer than others and find that even some young, healthy and fully vaccinated people may test positive for an extended period.Julia Rendleman for The New York Times

However, there is not a perfect correlation between someone’s antigen test results and whether their virus can be grown in culture. In a small, preliminary subanalysis, the Boston University researchers found that while a negative antigen test was a reliable indicator that the person would also have negative viral cultures, a positive test was not predictive of a positive culture.

“You can be somewhat reassured by a negative test, but the positive test is not particularly helpful,” said Dr. Tara Bouton, an infectious disease specialist at the Boston University School of Medicine and an author of the study.

Dr. Barczak’s team found that some people tested antigen-positive slightly beyond the point of having positive viral cultures. This suggests that at the end of an infection, there may be a brief period during which the tests are simply detecting lingering bits of viral protein. The study was not large enough to draw conclusions about how common this would be or how long the effect might last, she said.

Precisely why some people test positive longer than others is not entirely known. In general, people with weaker immune systems are likely to take longer to fight off the virus, scientists said, although even young, healthy and fully vaccinated people may be positive for extended periods.

Another possibility is that people exposed to large doses of the virus might take longer to clear it from their systems, said Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Tests also differ in their sensitivity, and people differ in how they perform them. “Some people do a swab test and it’s like they barely touch their nose,” Dr. Gordon said. “Whereas with other individuals — actually, with a family member recently, I had to be like, ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ because they were really, really getting in there.”

What to do

One lesson is that prolonged positive results are common enough that people who leave isolation before Day 10 should continue to take precautions, such as wearing a well-fitting mask, experts said.

Beyond that, scientists disagreed. Some recommended that people isolate until they test antigen-negative, even if it takes more than 10 days.

“We can now tailor recommendations to individual experiences using the rapid test results to guide us,” Dr. Grad said. “And since we know that some people can have prolonged courses, it seems reasonable to me that if you are able to continue isolating if positive, you should do so.”

But several others said that, as a matter of public health policy, it does not make sense to ask most otherwise healthy people to isolate, or even keep testing, for more than 10 days.

“Nobody’s saying that there aren’t some people, maybe statistically speaking at the end of the tail, who might transmit after Day 10,” Dr. Chin-Hong said. But people at that stage of infection would not be likely to play a large role in spreading the virus, and continued testing could keep many people out of work or school without much public health benefit, he said. “And also you raise an equity issue,” he added, “like, ‘Who on Earth can have enough tests?’”

Even then, experts say, there are some circumstances in which people should continue to test and potentially isolate beyond Day 10. They include people whose symptoms are not improving and those who are immunocompromised, as they may shed infectious virus for longer periods of time. (The C.D.C. recommends that people with weakened immune systems isolate for up to 20 days.)

There are also recent reports that people who take the antiviral drug Paxlovid may see their symptoms rebound after stopping the medication. “If they have symptoms that come back again after treatment, then it might be reasonable to extend isolation and to think about using tests,” Dr. Bouton said. “Viral load may come up in that situation.”

And people who have recently recovered from Covid might want to take a rapid test as a precaution before engaging in any particularly risky activities, such as meeting with an immunocompromised person or attending a large, indoor event. If they test positive, they should proceed as though they might be contagious, Dr. Gordon said.

“They’re probably less contagious than they were in the in the first few days,” she added. “But I would still certainly advise some caution.”

Emily Anthes is a reporter for The New York Times, where she focuses on science and health and covers topics like the coronavirus pandemic, vaccinations, virus testing and Covid in children.“

A Heartbroken Nation

May 28, 2022

David Butow/Redux

By The Editorial Board

“The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

The United States seems to be failing to protect its people by the week. With the gun massacre in East Buffalo followed by the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, many Americans have spent the past few days gripped by overwhelming incredulity and grief, exhaustion and fury over the loss of life. What can be done beyond living with heartbreak?

There is incredulity at the inaction of the police in Uvalde. Seventy-eight minutes elapsed after the gunman walked inside before police, believing “there were no kids at risk,” finally confronted him, according to Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Meanwhile, 911 dis­patch­ers re­ceived several calls from inside the class­room, in­clud­ing repeated calls from a child beg­ging them to send the po­lice. By the end of his rampage, the gunman had killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

Mr. McCraw acknowledged the multiple failures of judgment. In response to a question about whether the commander at the scene should offer an apology to the victims’ families, he said, “If I thought it would help, I would apologize.”

Police held back a group of horrified parents who gathered even as shots continued to ring out inside the school and begged officers to move in and try to rescue their children. At least one mother was put in handcuffs, only to spring over a fence and sprint into the school to scoop up her child when the opportunity presented itself. The police, she said, were “doing nothing.”

Those officers had been training for years for just such an attack. Yet when the moment came, all that preparation did nothing to stop a gunman wielding an assault rifle in a school full of children.

There is unspeakable grief over the deaths of children like Layla Salazar, who liked to make TikTok videos, wear denim jackets and sing “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on the way to school each morning.

“They took her away from us,” Layla’s grandfather Vincent Salazar told The Times. “How do you mend a broken heart from a family as close as we had?”

Irma Garcia, a teacher at Robb Elementary, liked classic rock. Her body was found with children still in her embrace, according to her nephew. A fourth grader who survived the attack said that Ms. Garcia and another teacher, Eva Mireles, had saved his and other students’ lives. “They were in front of my classmates to help,” he said. “To save them.”

There is also a profound sense of national exhaustion that comes when tragedy is layered upon tragedy. In Buffalo, three funerals were held on Friday for victims of the mass shooting that took place at a supermarket on May 14. Ten people were killed, and three others were wounded.

“It’s like Groundhog’s Day. We’ve seen this over and over again,” Mark Talley, the son of one of the victims, Geraldine Talley, said at a news conference on Thursday.

In Buffalo, a white gunman targeted a predominantly Black neighborhood with his AR-15-style assault rifle; he was an adherent of the racist conspiracy theory known as replacement theory, which posits that white Americans are being displaced by immigrants and people of color. Nearly half of Republicans told pollsters recently that they agree with the general thesis that a cabal of powerful people is encouraging immigrants to come here to sway politics.

The combination of paranoia and firearms has led to tragedy again and again. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Biden asked the nation on Tuesday.

The report of each gunshot in a mass killing echoes long after the next killing eclipses it. According to his family, Joe Garcia, Ms. Garcia’s husband, died on Thursday of a heart attack. Mr. Garcia, 50, had just gotten home from the memorial for his wife on Thursday morning when he collapsed.

It is entirely reasonable to ask how much more of this a nation can be expected to bear. The answer is infuriating: There have been 213 mass shootings in the United States in the first 21 weeks of 2022. An average of 321 Americans are shot every single day. And every day, there are roughly more than 50,000 gun sales recorded. Properly maintained, those guns will fire like new for decades.

There was some hope after the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, which left 20 children and six teachers dead, that America had finally reached the limit of tragedy it could withstand and that, perhaps, the gun lobby had reached the high-water mark of its power.

A decade later, neither of those holds true. On Friday, the former president Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina all spoke at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association in Houston, a few hours’ drive from Uvalde. There is no better manifestation of the gun lobby’s total capture of so much of the G.O.P.

States around the country have made halting but commendable progress in passing sensible gun safety measures — red flag laws, background checks and age of purchase requirements. They face stiff headwinds. A federal court this month struck down a California law that set the age limit for purchasingsemiautomatic weapons at 21. But the legislature is now considering other promising bills that would limit the advertising of certain guns to children and allow Californians to sue gun makers. Anything that introduces friction into the system of gun acquisition is to the good.

In New York this week, a federal judge tossed out a challenge from gun groups to a law that allows civil lawsuits against companies that have endangered public safety. And Gov. Kathy Hochul called on the legislature to raise the age limit to purchase some assault weapons to 21. The shooter in Texas waited until his 18th birthday to buy a pair of assault weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

In Washington, D.C., there is talk that Republican and Democratic lawmakers might make a deal on some type of national red flag law, which would allow the police to take guns away from people judged to be an imminent danger to themselves or others.

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has been leading a bipartisan group of senators that is considering establishing a more comprehensive federal background check system, a reform supported by 88 percent of Americans.

We have seen these bipartisan efforts on gun safety measures come and go without results. Still, in the face of Republican intransigence, Democrats — Mr. Biden, in particular — should do whatever they can. Senator Murphy, who has led the charge for tougher gun regulations since Sandy Hook, put it well on the floor of the Senate this past week:

“What are we doing?” he asked his colleagues. “Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority” he wondered, if the answer is to do nothing “as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives?”

It’s a question that speaks to the Senate directly and the entire system of American government more broadly. Yes, the country’s democratic system represents the diversity of views in this country on guns. But as currently structured, Congress is fundamentally unresponsive to the needs of its most vulnerable citizens and has been corrupted by powerful interest groups, allowing those groups to block even modest changes that the vast majority of Americans support.

We Americans all share this vast country and need to figure out how to make it better and keep one another alive and thriving. Right now, we’re failing at that primary responsibility. There are glimmers of hope, especially at the state level, that things are changing. But even there, progress is agonizingly slow and won’t be enough for the hundreds of Americans who will be shot today and tomorrow and every day until action is taken.“