She is 8 years old.

[AndyS]

Afterward, when a reporter from local TV station WUSA asked how she felt, Faris Nunn, chewing on a fingernail, spoke almost with nonchalance. “It was my second shooting,” she said, “so I was kind of prepared, ‘cause I always am expecting something to happen.” As she said it, she dropped her hand and gave a tiny shake of her head as if to say, “What are you going to do?”
===
One of humanity’s nobler attributes is its adaptability. To be human, after all, is to learn, often by bitter experience, that “normal” can change in an eyeblink of time. So surviving and thriving require an ability to adjust to whatever the new normal might be.
. . .
But sometimes, maybe we should be more maladjusted. Sometimes, adapting oneself to the new circumstance is less a hopeful sign of resilience than a troubling sign of collective failure. “I always am expecting something to happen,” she said.

She is 8 years old.

Eight-year-olds should not have to go about always expecting something to happen. That this one does — that a 7-year-old in South Carolina was diagnosed with PTSD after a shooting there, that a 6-year-old in D.C. was shot and killed the night before the ballpark incident — is an indictment of this country. It is a rebuke of every pundit and gun-lobby functionary who ever sold mass terror as freedom, of every lawmaker who ever accepted NRA blood money in exchange for conscience, of every voter who voted for the politician who promised more guns in more places, of every individual who fires a gun as a show of cheap courage and counterfeit toughness, of all our thoughts and prayers and deepest condolences, of all our words and promises and newspaper columns and court cases and debates and tweets and resolve and pain.

===
https://digital.olivesoftware.com/olive/ODN/HoustonChronicle/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=HHC%2F2021%2F07%2F25&entity=Ar01902&sk=8FA66172&mode=text

What is wrong with us?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. What is wrong with us? Indeed. It's a great question and I don't know the answer.

Or rather, I don't know where to start answering.

We're too afraid, and too proud to admit our fear, for starters. The list goes on, but the upshot is, nothing changes.

[samsingh]

2. its not us its republicans.

[KentuckyWoman]

3. Gun violence is non partisan

It is not just Republicans who own guns. Anyone who owns legal guns has an interest in getting the illegal trade shut down.

[samsingh]

4. republicans have supported the nra and allowed the proliferation of guns

they support gun culture, assault weapons and much else that leads to gun violence.

[betsuni]

5. Yes. There are an assault weapons ban in the 1994 crime bill, then Republicans gained control

of Congress and that was that.

Jim Clyburn:

"We put stuff in there that we thought we would build on. But then we lost in 1994, and all of the punitive stuff, the Republicans kept all that and got rid of some of the good stuff. ... We went left in this country in the 1994 bill. We put in the assault weapons ban. But when it came time for renewal, we didn't have the votes. The country had gone back to the right."

Unfortunately Democrats never had the votes again.