1.  Where a white nationalist can walk into a Walmart with a semiautomatic weapon in freaking Texas where he slaughters twenty people and injures two dozen others in six minutes.

2.  Texas. A state where a Walmart holding up to three thousand people would have had more than its fair share of “good guys with guns”. And yet, to no one’s surprise, that didn’t help those folks who got shot by the bad guy.

3.  Where a white shooter can post a GD manifesto railing against immigrants in Texas and pushing the preservation of European identity in America and still the first words out of Trump’s mouth aren’t white nationalist, white supremacy, or gun violence.

4.  Because only in America is it more politically palatable to blatantly disregard publicly stated facts and blame mental illness.

5.  Where twelve hours of news coverage revolves around a crime scene, gunman, and casualty updates – triggering for some, dismissed by others – a story of terror and violence and families who still had no idea if their family or friends survived the attack. And it’s just another day in American news.

6.  Where you wake up on Sunday morning to learn another mass shooting occurred overnight – this one in Dayton, Ohio.

7.  Where you hear there were nine fatalities and actually think “thank goodness it was only nine” before catching yourself because WTF, any death like this is one too many.

8.  Then to learn that those nine fatalities and twenty-seven injured happened in the space of twenty-four seconds. TWENTY-FOUR SECONDS. Tell me again how people “need” access to that sort of firepower.

9.  Where victim stories start pouring in – like the young mom who died shielding her two-month-old son from gunfire with her body, or the parents and kids who died doing back to school shopping – and we have to find a way once again to make peace with more lives destroyed because we can’t manage to even attempt writing sensible gun laws.

10.  Where you have a weekend with two mass shootings, within thirteen hours of each other, resulting in twenty-nine dead and fifty-three injured, and you can’t figure out why the bipartisan background check legislation passed by the House back in February STILL hasn’t been brought to the Senate floor for a vote. Except then you remember Mitch McConnell has brought our legislative body to a shrieking halt and wonder where all the Republicans with backbones have gone.