Three children are dead. The country, again, has failed.
 | By Susannah Meadows Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
"How could anyone do this?" It is the inevitable question we ask when we find ourselves here again, in the wake of a school shooting. This time, the killer gunned down three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville, and our incomprehension is renewed. |
But is that the right question? If it's only here in America where we have a problem like this, where deadly shootings on school grounds have become horrifically routine, you have to wonder about responsibility. |
As Esau McCaulley, a contributing Opinion writer, says in an essay this week, the reality is that we are a country that does this to our children. By failing to pass meaningful gun control laws, we are allowing these shootings to continue. |
McCaulley argues that the latest deaths are a rebuke of our inaction. "Every single young body riddled with bullets from guns that we could control preaches a sermon. They issue a word of condemnation, a jeremiad," he writes. |
"There are many ways to judge the success or failure of a country," he adds. "We can look at its economy, the strength of its military or the quality of its education. We can examine the soundness of our bridges or the smoothness of our highways. But what if we used a different standard? We should judge a nation by a simple metric: the number of weeping parents it allows, the small caskets it tolerates." |
By this standard, America has obviously failed. So perhaps the question to ask now is, "How could anyone not do something about this?" |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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