Tomorrow will mark four weeks from the day that three 9-year-olds and three adults were murdered at a Christian school in Nashville. The family and friends of those who were killed will never be the same. They are only at the very beginning of a long, hard journey through deepest grief. But in many ways, our nation has moved on.

Mass shootings have simply become a part of American life. We have had more mass shootings than days so far in 2023. More broadly, gun-related tragedies happen every day across America, including the shooting of an unarmed African American teenager last week in Kansas City, Mo. There are simply too many tragedies caused by firearms for ordinary Americans to keep track of them. Gun violence now seems so woven into the fabric of our culture that, for the most part, it recedes from sight, only gaining attention when a shooting is deemed so troubling or unexpected that it makes national news for a few days. We as a society have grown numb to daily, horrific, preventable tragedy.

The problem of guns in America is vast and complex. In a chilling 2022 piece, The Times named our age the “era of the gun,” with gun violence as the leading cause of death among children in the United States. This is a national crisis. Studies have shown comprehensively that more guns and easier access to guns leads, inevitably, to more gun deaths, which is why America is a global outlier when it comes to rates of gun violence. As German Lopez wrote for The Times last year: “In every country, people get into arguments, hold racist views or suffer from mental health issues. But in the U.S., it is easier for those people to pick up a gun and shoot someone.”

READ MORE