Gunfire Erupts at a School. Leaders Offer Prayers. Children Are Buried. Repeat.<br />Even the dark humor in the headline of a satirical story in The Onion, first published in 2014, has since been stripped of<br />any mirth, leaving only a dark, accepted truth: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”<br />Last month, in the wake of another school shooting<br />that you may have already forgotten — a 15-year-old boy killing two classmates and wounding 18 other people in Kentucky — a former F. B.I.<br />On Wednesday, it was Scott Israel, the sheriff of Florida’s Broward County, who stepped forward to announce the toll<br />of a massacre inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: 17 children and adults dead, another 16 wounded.<br />Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat whose state experienced the Sandy Hook massacre, once<br />again denounced the inaction by Congress to properly address the “epidemic” of school shootings.<br />Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who has benefited from N. R.A.<br />largess over the years, expressed his sadness about another mass shooting in his state<br />— remember the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 that left 49 dead and dozens wounded?<br />“I spent four years dealing with these kinds of events after Sandy Hook,” said the former agent, Katherine<br />W. Schweit, a co-author of a study of 160 active shooting incidents in the United States.<br />And in 2012, a gunman walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 children, none older than 7, and six adults.
