Here we are, again, in the midst of yet another epochal tragedy.
This one will change everything, right? How can 49 innocents in an Orlando club be mowed down like animals by an unhinged hater and everything stay the same?
How? The same way a lunatic unloads in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and everything stays the same. The same way a troubled youth rips to pieces 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Conn., and everything stays the same. The same way a couple wipes 14 people off the planet in San Bernardino, Calif., and everything stays the same.
Twelve killed at the Washington Navy Yard. Nine at a church in Charleston, N.C. Nine more at a community college in Roseburg, Ore. The bodies pile up. Everything stays the same. Moments that should be cataclysmic leave us just where we were: grieving over the last one; bracing, helpless, for the next.
Does a mass shooting less massive even register with us any more? Only six dead. Just four. Could have been worse. It takes a really horrific event to really stick with many of us — victims who seem somehow especially pitiable, a setting where we can easily imagine ourselves, a location closer to home, a higher death toll — one that breaks the template. It’s sick that we have a template.
And so, Orlando: A record-setting number of casualties, the victims likely targeted because they were gay. This one, we have to really stop and see. It’s hard to imagine worse. But then again . . .
This one was bad enough to spike gun company stock prices , as gun enthusiasts rush to further arm themselves just in case what never happens happens, and the nation is finally moved to stanch the flow of unrestricted weaponry. A hellish day for Orlando is a great one for Smith & Wesson.
And what’s good for the gun manufacturers is good for many members of Congress, buoyed by millions in campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. So Congress looks after the NRA, which looks after the gun manufacturers, which look after only themselves. Blood money is legal tender.
Somehow, gun control advocates, beaten down by years of deaths and defeats, go on. “If I didn’t do anything, I couldn’t stop crying,’’ says John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, who has been at the battle for more than two decades. They ask for changes that are almost comically modest: We’re not trying to take your God-given guns away, they say. We truly respect your rights. But perhaps we could find a way to keep them out of the hands of people flagged as possible terrorists? Maybe, pretty please, we could ban the ones meant for battle — the AR-15s, and the high-capacity magazines designed specifically for mowing down scores of human beings in minutes?
Long ago, before the NRA owned them so completely, congressional lawmakers said yes to an assault weapons ban. But now they say no. The Second Amendment absolutists give no quarter, no matter how many people are murdered. Give them liberty and give us death.
And what do the rest of us do? With each massacre, we grieve. Those of us who have not succumbed to numbness or despair (Sandy Hook changed nothing) are enraged. None of it goes anywhere.
There was a time when people in this country came together and took to the streets by the thousands, relentless in a years-long fight to stop senseless deaths in Vietnam. We don’t come together any more. The body count in the war at home is higher, but our capacity for unity, and for sustained outrage, has drained away.
Still, some Democrats in Congress appear to be mustering. A few of them refused to take part in a moment of silence for the victims — a gesture as empty as can be imagined, given the track record of inaction. At this writing, some senators are filibustering in an attempt to force their opponents to consider gun control legislation.
It seems futile.
Or perhaps Orlando will be the one that changes everything.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.