Can we stop this?

The "Hero's Welcome" editorial cartoon by Canadian artist Pia Guerra.

I'm one of those discouraged adults who reacts to mass shootings, even to school shootings, with a jaded sigh: "nothing will change." Our national devotion to a right to own weapons with which to kill our neighbors is just too entrenched. Let's hear it for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School young people who are out to prove that change is possible.
***Erudite Partner teaches college students barely older than these Parkland survivors. I've asked her more than once whether she's afraid of a shooter on campus, even among her students. She says "yes."***There's much commentary on the fact that these survivors are from a generation that grew up after Columbine, that meaningless massacre in 1999 of 13 students, by students, outside Denver. Columbine is considered the archetype of the school shooting. But I ponder ...

• A friend I worked with told me the story of being escorted out of elementary school by a policeman and rushed past the murdered body of a teacher in the yard. The schools have never been entirely free of the violence around them. This was in Texas in the 1960s. They [preferred pronoun] may never have gotten over it, eventually taking their own life, by handgun.

• At Columbine, the crux of the horror, on top of the slaughter, was that no one knew that these two white suburban boys from middle class homes had gone over the edge. At Parkland, it seems that most everyone knew, but no one could do anything.

We're never going to be willing as a society to put out enough resources to enable us to heal every troubled teen -- but we sure could keep them from having access to lethal armament.