In southern Texas, a deadly Sunday for the innocent

The profile and the arsenal and the apparent “causes” were similar. Time and again in reading of the worst mass shootings in America, the same descriptions involving the killer or killers come up: mental health problems, revenge, hatred of a co-worker or co-workers, frustration with a life gone south, and yes, sometimes, terror.

The first few descriptions would seem to apply to 26-year-old Devin Kelley, a frustrated and violent young man who might have been intent on paying the world back for a miserable life of his own making. But after leaving 26 people from the ages of 5 to 72 dead on a church site Sunday morning in Sutherland Springs in south Texas, Kelley of course hadn’t paid the world back at all. He’d simply earned himself a shameful place in history as one of the worst mass killers in the American story.

Who knows what motivated Kelley to don his black protective gear and go to the First Baptist Church with a variety of military-style weapons, the same types of guns seen in other tragedies from Newtown to Las Vegas to Orlando to ... too many places? Who knows how someone with a less-than-honorable military discharge and a record that included domestic abuse and prison time, someone with all the signs of trouble to come, managed to acquire an arsenal?

But, oh, yes, that’s happened before. It’s the question that seems to be asked in some form every time there is a catastrophe such as this one. Deadly weapons in the hands of someone who becomes, in an instant, a deadly weapon himself.

So now, families of the dead and those of other victims wounded in the shooting will grieve for the rest of their lives. Consider all of the anguish in all of these people, across the generations. That 5-year-old had parents and grandparents and cousins and friends from nursery school ... all to be scarred forever now. The same is true, of course, of all the families who have become the latest to be touched by such senseless tragedy.

It is not time, not right now, to launch another debate in this country over the epidemic of high-powered firearms and how they wind up in the hands of people who should not have them, sometimes even people who have clearly demonstrated to law enforcement that they shouldn’t have them. And there’s the other question, about why people presumably engaged in mainly hunting or sport shooting – and make no mistake, that’s true of the vast, vast majority of law-abiding citizens who own guns – need these military-style weapons capable of firing so many rounds in seconds, a feature that would seem of value only in war, when it might be necessary to kill or be killed.

The gun rights lobby, overtaken by those on the most extreme end of the political spectrum, will delay some comment in the immediate aftermath of this incident, and of course the National Rifle Association already has President Trump on its side.

But there must be a renewed debate. There must. The death toll from these tragedies is mounting, and the similarities among them, most notably the high-powered, military-style weapons involved in almost all these incidents, must be faced and answered.

For now, we do what Americans have done after Newtown, after Las Vegas, after Virginia Tech, which is to mourn the victims of senseless violence and to comfort their families as best we can. It doesn’t seem like enough. It never does. But it is what we must do.

This story was originally published November 6, 2017 at 10:18 AM with the headline "In southern Texas, a deadly Sunday for the innocent."