I’m hoping at some point today I’ll get angry. Anger might be nice. Right now all I can muster up is a sort of deep, abiding melancholy.

Today there’ll be the standard offering of thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families, which are totally fucking worthless. As usual, there’ll be a pointless search for ‘answers’ — why and how ‘something like this’ can happen here. But whatever answers there are to be found will be totally fucking worthless, because we won’t actually do anything. There’ll be the predictable calls for effective gun legislation, which will be totally fucking worthless — and of course gun sales in Florida will skyrocket for a week or so, also totally fucking worthless.

There’ll be tearful memorial services, and people will leave flowers and notes and teddy bears outside the nightclub, and some newspaper or magazine will print photographs of all twenty twenty-nine fifty (the butcher’s bill keeps changing) of the fatally wounded victims. And it’ll all be totally fucking worthless, because we’ve done all that before and we all know that we’ll be doing it again.

Waiting for the dead and wounded.

For the next few days we’ll be reading the tweets sent by folks in the nightclub, we’ll be seeing chaotic smartphone videos and facebook posts. We’ll be hearing accounts from those who escaped, and the memories of family and friends of the dead (“He was a good boy, never bothered anybody, always willing to help, loved animals”), and we’ll tell ourselves what a tragic event this was and lamenting how many young, innocent lives were cut short. But all that will be totally fucking worthless because absolutely nothing will change. Not one goddamn thing.

I’m back. I had to step away for a while. Because you know what else is totally fucking worthless? Another blog post on another mass shooting.

I’d probably have just deleted all this and got on with my day had I not had a short chat with a friend. Here’s the reason it was a short chat — he said “Bernie would have found a way to get gun control passed if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.” And that anger I’d been searching for, it started to perk up. I held it in, though, and said if the Democrats can re-take Congress, maybe Hillary can get something passed. Which is when he said something like “I’ll never vote for Hillary, I’m done voting for the lesser of two evils, I’ll vote for the Green Party, I don’t care if Trump wins.”

Here’s yet another thing that’s totally fucking worthless: that guy’s opinion. But it helped me find that anger.

If there any chance at all — even a remote chance — of passing even the weakest and most tepid gun safety legislation, Democrats need to keep the White House and win both houses of Congress. Trump sure as hell isn’t going to do anything about guns.

Don’t tell me you want to stop mass shootings but aren’t willing to vote for Clinton because your candidate lost the primary. I don’t care if you think Clinton and Donald Trump are both the spawn of Satan — only one spawn of Satan has professed any interest in passing some responsible gun laws. I don’t care if the Green Party candidate has a plan to seize and melt every goddamn gun in the US and turn them all into orthodontic braces for poor kids — the Green Party isn’t going to win; they can only suck votes away from Clinton. I don’t care if the notion of voting for Clinton actually makes you physically ill — vomit, then vote Democratic and start pushing for gun safety legislation.

You don’t have to like Clinton. You don’t even have to trust her. All you have to do is ask yourself which of the two candidates — which of the two major political parties — is most likely to press for reasonable gun safety laws. And if you loathe Hillary Clinton more than you loathe mass shootings, then as far as I’m concerned you’re also totally fucking worthless.

We don’t know very much. His name, we know that. Robert Lewis Dear. Fifty-seven years old, six-four, about 250 pounds. Beard. We know he was armed with some variation of the AK-47. We know he used it to kill three people and wound nine others. We know this took place in and around a Planned Parenthood facility.

REUTERS/Isaiah J. Downing

Beyond that, we can only speculate. Make informed guesses. Form conjectures. Assign blame. Most people, hearing about the shooting, assume it was an attack on Planned Parenthood. It’s a pretty safe assumption. It may turn out to be wrong, but there’s plenty of support for that assumption.

PP clinics are routinely vandalized. They’ve been the target of arson attacks and a variety of homemade bombs. PP employees are frequently harassed, often threatened, sometimes assaulted. occasionally killed. In recent months PP as an organization has been falsely accused of crimes through widely distributed, highly edited, agenda-driven videos. The organization has been widely demonized by Republican presidential candidates. So is anybody really surprised to hear a mass shooting is taking place at a Planned Parenthood clinic? Is anybody really surprised to turn on their television and see police officers in military gear establishing a perimeter around an active shooter barricaded inside the clinic?

This morning, still less than 24 since the shooting began, we don’t know that this was a deliberate attack on Planned Parenthood. But as assumptions go, this is a pretty solid and completely logical one.

Unless you’re an extreme conservative. Unless you’re a regular on FreeRepublic. In that case, you assume the active shooter at a Planned Parenthood clinic is a Muslim terrorist. While the shooting was underway, I followed the FreeRepublic discussion thread. Here’s a sampling of what I saw:

– Colorado Springs was one of the cities ISIS listed it wanted to attack…
– Quite likely a case of Islamic Terrorism at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, despite Obama promises that America was safe over the Thanksgiving Holiday.
– Hope that the injured recover quickly. From a politics standpoint – it does not matter. Now the message will be that all terrorists come from all part of the world. There will be no way to stop the Islo terrors.

But if it wasn’t Muslims, then it was probably a ‘false flag’ event — a covert operation designed to deceive the public and disguise who actually planned and executed it in an effort to further an undisclosed agenda. Almost certainly not a decent white Christian conservative man.

– I suspect false flag. Left wing nut cases doing this.
– If they are a shooter, it is a false flag operation.
– Too many benefits for the left for it NOT to be a flase flag. 1. Equate white Christians with Muslim terrorists 2. Gun control. 3. Counterbalance the memory of the videos 4. Damage pro-lifers.
– I’m more than willing to find out what happened later, because I know oboma needs a major sized false flag right now. He seriously has to draw attention away from his ISIS boys and Syrian imports and make their innocent victims the new boogie man instead. Things aren’t always what they appear to be.
– I think it is a staged by the left event in order to get pro-lifers placed on official terrorist lists, all to help Hillary and the Democrats in general.

Who would plan and execute a false flag assault on Planned Parenthood? And what would be the ‘real’ purpose of the attack? President Obama, of course, and his left-wing minions who want to disarm innocent white male Christians.

– They hope it is “Christian terrorism,” which, incidentally, does not exist. Until we know for sure, it could be a false flag operation, or something else.
– Hold onto your guns. This will absolutely result in major, major anti-gun maneuvering by Obama. You can’t assault the ultimate feminist sacrament of all time without paying on hell of a high price.

But if it wasn’t Muslims and it wasn’t a false flag event, then it was almost certainly the work of liberals or ‘leftists’ who are clearly insane. Conservatives would never do such a thing.

– A leftist looney with a gun…who would’ve thought. BO cannot say this was a right wing idiot!! Not this time!!
– Odds are it’s a leftist or retard. It’s a thin line.
– Those of us against abortion and planned murderhood are not the types that blow up and shoot up people and places.
– The media will get quiet pretty quickly when they dig into the suspect’s background and find out he was an ardent Leftist.

But even if the shooter was NOT a liberal or leftist, you can be sure those hippie types (and all those Planned Parenthood billionaires) are delighted about the shooting.

– This is where there loony lefties start equating perceived right wing terrorism with islamic terrorism. RIght wing terrorism doesn’t exist, at least in the US, but they are looking for any reason at all to show us that the Muslims really aren’t all that bad after all.
– Distraction to make pro-lifers look bad and counterbalance the videos? These people have the same moral code as the Nazis or the Communists — so it wouldn’t surprise me if this is for show. As much as the Planned Parenthood billionaires love to play the victim, the fact that even the (friendly) media is being kept away seems suspicious to me.
– The left is rubbing their hands with glee over this, I assume.
– they so want this to be tea party type trying to shoot up PP…but it may be a bank robbery gone bad.
– Leftists are all over this as “Christian terrorism” before the body is even cold.
— You would think leftists would be cheering, an officer is dead
– Know why liberals don’t like Christmas? Because it’s about a birth, not an abortion.

We don’t know very much. Maybe the Freepers are right. Maybe Robert Lewis Dear is a Muslim. Maybe he’s involved in a sinister false flag operation designed by the Obama administration to give them an excuse to seize everybody’s firearms. Maybe Dear is a leftist looney, or maybe he’s in the hire of Planned Parenthood billionaires who need to be entertained.

Robert Lewis Dear

But if it turns out he’s NOT a Muslim or a leftist, if we discover the shooting was NOT a false flag operation, if Robert Lewis Dear happens to be a white male conservative Christian who was deliberately attacking the Planned Parenthood clinic — well, then that’s okay.

– And how many active killings going on inside the building?
– Only in a fallen, lawless America: A mass shooting in which more innocent lives are likely saved today than are lost, and in which a number of the innocents who were saved today will be brought back tomorrow to be murdered, with police standing guard for the murderers.
– At least the baby killers got the holy crap scared out of them. Maybe some will repent. unlikely.
– At least some lives were saved today!
– Won’t it be wonderful if some who didn’t get abortions today decide not.
– I do not care. IF someone kills members of Planned Parenthood, I simply do not care. If i’m on a jury, i’ll acquit. What they do at Planned Parenthood should never have been tolerated in the first place.

We’ll know more about Robert Lewis Dear before the day is out. We’ll be more informed about his motivations. Eventually we’ll know more about the weapon he used to kill three and wound nine other innocent people; we’ll know whether he bought it legally or not. We’ll know more. But we won’t be any smarter.

The ugly truth is that whatever we learn about this guy and why he did what he did, it won’t change anything. The United States has become a culture ruled by fear, a culture in which politics are dominated by anger and bluster, a culture in which opinion and belief overrule rationality and science. We’ve become a culture in which the expression ‘active shooter’ has become commonplace.

It’s become traditional, after high publicity mass killings, for the families of the victims to make a public statement. And right there, that demonstrates how routine mass killings have become. We’ve developed social patterns based on them, and those patterns have developed into traditions.

Most often, these family statements take the form of a public eulogy. The families talk about the victim — how wonderful they were, how tragic their death, how much they had to offer society, how much they’ll be missed. Sometimes the statements will include a call for finding some way to insure “this will never happen again.” That call will be repeated for a while, then conveniently ignored.

The family of 18-year-old Quinn Cooper, who was killed in the Umpqua Community College mass killing, has issued the traditional statement. It includes this:

“We are hearing so many people talk about gun control and taking people’s guns away. If the public couldn’t have guns it wouldn’t help since sick people like this will always be able to get their hand on a gun(s).

We need to be able to protect ourselves as a community and as a nation. Please don’t let this horrible act of insanity become about who should or shouldn’t have a gun. Please remember the victims and their families. Please remember Quinn.”

I have a lot of empathy for the Cooper family. I’m certain they are sincere in their belief that nothing can be done to prevent these tragedies. But sadly, they are misguided — and more to the point, they’re just plain wrong.

Quinn Cooper

This ‘horrible act of insanity’ is always about who should and shouldn’t have a gun. I’m sure the Cooper family would agree that Chris Harper Mercer should not have been able to stockpile an arsenal of a dozen or more firearms. The only reason ‘sick people’ are ‘always…able to get their hands on a gun’ is because we’ve made it ridiculously easy for them to do so. The only reason so many people were killed and wounded at the Umpqua Community College is because we’ve made it ridiculously easy for mass killers to hike up the body count.

And we’ve done it deliberately. We’ve deliberately created a convoluted and inconsistent record-keeping system that impedes the transmission of mental health records to gun dealers. We’ve deliberately created barriers that prevent law enforcement officers from obtaining or sharing information about potentially illegal firearm transactions. We’ve deliberately created an alternate system of firearm sales that’s essentially designed to avoid background checks.

And, of course, when I say ‘we’ deliberately did that, what I really mean is ‘Republican legislators’ and ‘the National Rifle Association’ have deliberately done that, along with a scattering of cowardly and selfish Democrats.

Yes, of course, there will always be disturbed people who want to kill groups of people. And yes, of course, many of them will always be determined enough to find a way to do that. But we don’t have to make it so easy for them. And we don’t have to give them tools that multiply the body count.

The Cooper family is right in one regard: we should remember the victims and their families. We should remember Quinn. And we should also take a few simple common sense steps to prevent other families from experiencing what the Cooper family is coping with right now. One last line from the Cooper family statement:

“No one should ever have to feel the pain we are feeling.”

Agreed. So maybe instead of just offering post-tragedy ‘thoughts and prayers’ we should take a few practical steps to make it a wee bit more difficult for these tragedies to take place.

“Let me be very clear, I will not name the shooter. I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act.”

That was Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin speaking at a news conference in which he briefed the news media about the mass killing at Umpqua Community College. He announced ten people had died during the crime, but refused to say whether the shooter was one of them.

Sheriff Hanlin is a man of strong opinions and beliefs — and some of those opinions and beliefs are about firearms. The sheriff and I have that in common.

Sheriff John Hanlin

Here’s another thing we have in common: on January 15, 2013 both Sheriff Hanlin and I were writing about guns. It was a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. A month after six adult school staff members and twenty children — all aged six or seven — were slaughtered in a five-minute shooting spree. Let me just repeat that bit. The victims were little kids. A month after a mentally deranged young man deliberately walked through the halls of a school shooting little kids.

It was also the day before President Obama was scheduled to propose some new executive firearm policies. Both Sheriff Hanlin and I were writing about that on the 15th of January. I was writing to mock Texas Republican Steve Stockman, who’d vowed to thwart the president’s proposals by any means necessary. Stockman didn’t know what those proposals were, but he was sure they were “an attack on the Constitution and a violation of his sworn oath of office – they are a direct attack on Americans that place all of us in danger.”

That’s right — a member of Congress claimed a few policy proposals made by the President of the United States were a direct attack on Americans that would place all of us in danger.

Sheriff John Hanlin

Sheriff Hanlin — the law enforcement officer in charge of the investigation of yesterday’s mass killing — was writing a letter to Vice President Joe Biden to say pretty much the same thing (full letter is below). Biden had been named to head an  interagency gun-violence task force after the Sandy Hook massacre. Sheriff Hanlin requested that Biden’s task force:

…NOT tamper with or attempt to amend the 2nd Amendment. Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings.

Hanlin went on to formally notify the vice president:

…any federal regulation enacted by Congress of by executive order by the President offending the Constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies, nor will I permit the enforcement of any unconstitutional regulations or orders by federal officers within the borders of Douglas County Oregon.

Got that? The sheriff was essentially announcing that he didn’t care what the President of the United States or Congress wanted, he was going to insure that folks in his county could have all the guns they wanted, all the high-capacity magazines they wanted, and all the ammunition they wanted.

In effect, Sheriff Hanlin was protecting the right of Chris Harper Mercer to buy and own three pistols and a semi-automatic rifle. The weapons Chris Harper Mercer used to kill nine citizens in Douglas County. The weapons Chris Harper Mercer used to wound ten other citizens, ones he failed to kill. Those are all citizens Sheriff Hanlin is sworn and duty-bound to protect.

Chris Harper Mercer

Sheriff Hanlin refuses to say Chris Harper Mercer’s name because he “will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act.” I think it’s important that we all say the name of both Chris Harper Mercer and Sheriff John Hanlin. Sheriff Hanlin deserves his share of the credit.

NOTE: Here is the letter Sheriff Hanlin sent to Vice President Biden:

By the way, I’ve written about these so-called Constitutional Sheriffs before, and Sheriff Hanlin’s name is included. If you’re willing to put up with it, here are The Dimwit Sheriffs and the Return of the Dimwit Sheriffs.