Uvalde

Uvalde has to be the worst school shooting at least four years.

It's bad enough that 21 individuals - 19 of them children, most of them Hispanic - were shot to death by a gunman with an AR-15 assault rifle in the elementary school of this Texas town.  Even worse was that the police decided not to force their way into the classroom where the gunman did his deed because he barricaded himself in the classroom and they made the decision not refrain from storming the room per the situation at hand.  It was the wrong decision.  The gunman kept shooting, and a couple of kids inside had called 911 on their cell phones for swift action from the police that never came.  The authorities are till trying to explain away their fatal mistake, changing their stories constantly.

Texas governor Greg Abbott says he is livid about how the police acted, but he has no right to complain, since he paid lip service to improving school safety measures in Texas and has not supported and will not support sensible gun-control measures.  And I'm not sure Beto O'Rourke, Abbott's Democratic electoral opponent, wins any points for disrupting an Abbott press conference to confront the governor directly on guns, since it probably came across to many voters as a shameless stunt to get free media.  I still suspect that Abbott will be re-elected this November, if only because Texas voters care more about inflation.

U.S. Senate Republican leader has asked Texas Republican senator John Cornyn to talk with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut about a possible deal on gun-safety measures.  But even something that modest us unlikely, given the weakened-but-still-potent National Rifle Association's hold on Republican senators.

Seen outside this weekend's National Rifle Association convention in . . . Houston.  Houston, Texas.

I've pretty much given up on this country.  How do I live with what's going on in These States?  How do I deal with it?  I can't . . . I can't. 😢