It doesn’t matter how many people are slaughtered. It doesn’t even matter if they’re children, as they were in Texas yesterday. In America, the response to gun violence is nothing.

By David Sirota, Jacobin

There are no words. Even typing out this sentence feels ridiculous, pathetic, sickening.

What is there to say that hasn’t been uttered a million times before?

What can possibly be said when nineteen kids and a teacher are dead, days after another mass shooting, and another mass shooting before that, and another . . . and another?

What revelatory phrases or comments or “thoughts and prayers” can be uttered or tapped out on a keyboard or yelled into a microphone when we know from experience how this will almost certainly play out from here?

Participants in the Gun Laws Save Lives Rally, a protest against the weakening of gun laws, on December 2, 2019 at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington DC

The massacre.

The press conferences updating the body count.

The official statements and tweets and Facebook posts and floor speeches expressing outrage.

Then more of the same.

The politicians heading to another National Rifle Association conference to scream about freedom.

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