Helpless to change

Change is not coming. There's no hope for an end to insane massacres:

"I hate to say it, but we as Americans are basically experts at this kind of thing by now,” said 45-year-old market analyst Jared Gerson, adding that the number of media images of Aurora, CO citizens crying and looking shocked is “pretty much right in line with where it usually is at this point." "The calls not to politicize the tragedy should be starting in an hour, but by 1:30 p.m. tomorrow the issue will have been politicized. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter’s high school classmate is interviewed within 45 minutes."

"It's like clockwork," said Gerson, who sighed, shook his head, and walked away.

The tools for mass killing are readily available to a succession of crazy people, but we staunchly refuse to do anything further about it:

“It’s hard to prevent someone who is really bent on committing a crime from getting them,” [Eugene Volokh, an expert in constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles,] added, and “it’s unlikely that gun laws are going to stop him.”

Make no mistake about this. The social and political choice that we Americans have made about guns is that they should be more or less freely available, even if one predictable cost of this free availability is much more frequent mass killings than other nations have. Not to mention much more frequent murders than in other nations.

Good, bad, or indifferent, that's what we've chosen. And it's why we're so familiar with this that the Onion's satire is so apt.

Update (7/22): Some Teapublican wingers will come right out and admit to the inevitable correlation of mass killings with the easy-access gun rights they favor:

I suppose there's value in getting the issue thoroughly out into the open.