We have become the sort of nation where friends and relatives are increasingly likely to have to telephone, email, text or tweet their loved ones with news that they haven't been shot in the latest senseless massacre in a public place.
It happened to me on Tuesday, when I called my sister to make sure she, my brother-in-law and their two small children hadn't been killed or wounded when Jacob Tyler Roberts, one of the countless disaffected zeros who have crossed over into the realm of being known by all three of their names, donned a hockey mask and took up a semiautomatic rifle that he had stolen from a friend. In the Macy's and the food court at the Clackamas Town Center, just outside Portland, Ore., Roberts gunned down two people and wounded a third before killing himself.
My sister — because she is eight years younger I still consider her to be my little sister — had been at home.
And home is usually a safe place. An elementary school is usually a safe place, and often an especially pleasant place to be a week before holiday break.
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The killing of 27 people, 20 of them children, at a school in Newtown, Conn., on Friday morning was in some ways similar to the atrocities that had come before it. There was the cold splash of the first reports followed by the frenzied grab for information, chased by numb media overload — the granular analysis of psychopathic strategy, with phrases like "maximum lethality" and "fields of fire."
Perhaps due to the fact that so many of the victims were children, there was something different in the initial political response to the killings, and what they might portend about the debate over gun control. Despite a flurry of "now is not the time" statements, there were a number of politicians who decided that now was the time, at least, to make the connection between national policy and national outrage.
Without getting specific, Gov. Andrew Cuomo hoped the incident would "finally be the wake-up call for aggressive action," while President Barack Obama, shedding more tears than Americans are used to seeing in a White House briefing, said the nation was "going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."
If you had to sum up these and similar expressions, you would need just one word: Enough.
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If you want a clearer sense of what time it is, consider that November was the biggest month on record for gun sales in the U.S. The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System processed more than 2 million checks, beating the previous holiday-season record of 1.86 million from last December. (While the number of checks doesn't exactly track the number of completed sales, the FBI estimates that less than 1 percent of checks result in a denial.)
We won't even need December's numbers to make 2012 the record-breaking year for background checks: The 11-month total of 16.8 million breezes past 2011's total of 16.4 million. And it's a virtual lock that 2012 will hit another benchmark in gun sales by doubling the 9.1 million checks conducted in 1999, the first full year of the federal program. The annual number of checks has gone up every year since 2002, when it was 8.5 million.
If the topic of this column seems familiar, that's because I touched on similar themes after the June killings at the cineplex in Aurora, Colo. James Holmes killed 12 people that night — a number that seems to recede after the reports from Newtown.
Just as the numbers from Newtown might recede, when the next one happens.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 454-5619