"I bring this up merely to show that the responsible gun owner narrative has been taking a real fucking beating lately...."

Not sure what I was expecting today but it wasn't this.

Another mass shooting. Another mass killing. Four more dead. At least 8 injured, including a police officer in critical condition. Another lone weirdo with an "AR-15 type weapon", which is the fallback name du jour so that gun psychos don't rip their panties defending their favorite hunting rifle. It only took the good guys with guns 3 minutes to show up. And they responded heroically. They surely saved lives. But four are still dead. Guns are faster than police cars. The shooter live-streamed the entire thing on his Instagram page.

And here's the thing. When I learned that it wasn't a school (it happened in a Louisville, KY bank), I actually exhaled a little. That's what we've become. There's a part of us that says "it's not so bad.....at least it's not children".

I'm not sure what the says about us. Surely nothing good. But these events have traumatized us to the point where such distinctions are all we have left. Whether we like it or not, we convince ourselves that 5 dead is better than 10 dead, and that it's some sort of macabre improvement when the victims are wholly innocent adults and not wholly innocent kids.