By the third day, the bare contents of the news are digested into narratives by interested parties. This initiates the process through which everyone stops caring about the shooting, and turns back to other matters. For the right, mass shootings are about a cultural malaise for which there is no cure, or buildings with too many doors. For everyone else, they’re about guns. This is a culture war so stolid and hoary that it hardly bears repeating even in effigy, and is so spent that it scarcely captures an entire news cycle anymore. You have already had this argument so many times.
At our little party on the Fourth of July, as the evening wound down we stood around a modest bonfire and talked in low tones about Chicago: “Is it just five or six?” Just five or six, I marveled, though I had been the one to ask. Smoke obscured the shape of the fire. Someone said the shooter had been on a rooftop, which was novel—though not so novel, not after the University of Texas, and Dallas, and Las Vegas. It made sense, somebody else said, that they would start staking out crow’s nests. Our miniature fireworks show had begun several yards away, showers of brilliant color. My girls lingered nearby enraptured, bouncing on bare feet. Then came the finale, grand sputtering blasts of light, the sudden thunder of which sent my toddler racing, startled, into my arms. I stole her up from the ground and held her tight against my body, where this weary panic has come to dwell, I think, forever.
On the fourth day after a mass shooting, other news has already begun to compete with the murders for real estate on newspaper A1s and landing pages. The fade-out begins. You know what to do. Forget what you can, try to move on, salvage what’s left of you. Soon enough, it’ll feel too quiet again.
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