Wake-up call, again

Show of solidarity: Children holding photos of victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting during a minute of silence outside the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas, a few days after the horrific massacre of children at the school. – AFP

THE mass murder of children in Uvalde, Texas, coming just 10 days after the mass murder of shoppers in Buffalo, New York, moved former Senator Bill Frist – who was the majority leader of a Republican Senate when President George W. Bush was in the White House – to issue a statement on guns: “We can find ways to preserve the Second Amendment while also safeguarding the lives of our children.... The time to act is now.”

The impulse to overcome long-standing divisions to find solutions is laudable. But the assumption behind Frist’s comment, and much of the rest of the national discussion of gun crime, is that progress is mostly a matter of getting enough Americans to have the right sentiments.