John Tierney

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.

The most important thing you need to know about yesterday’s tragic school shooting in Texas is that absolutely no laws are going to change as a result of it.

In the 14 years since the Supreme Court found an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment in the landmark case of D.C. v. Heller, the federal judiciary has only grown more conservative. The courts will likely bar any meaningful restrictions on the possession of firearms for at least another generation.

Your fellow Americans, meanwhile, who collectively bought 40 million firearms in 2020 and 2021, have grown even less enamored with the various gun-control measures typically floated by politicians after such tragedies. In Texas, the same Republican lawmakers cruising to reelection this fall made relaxing the state’s already permissive gun laws a priority in the last legislative session.  

Every month or so, I receive a glossy coupon from Victoria's Secret in my mailbox. "Free panty!" it beckons. "No purchase necessary!"

Reading those words, I cringe a little bit. Not because I hate underwear—I'm an ardent lover of underwear. It's because I hate the word "panty." I hate the plural form of "panty" as well. "Panties" creeps me out.

And apparently I'm not alone. In addition to a slew of blog posts and message boards denouncing the word, The Huffington Post's Zoë Triska named it "the worst word ever." Cracked.com included "panties" in its list of the "Five Words That Need To Be Banned From English."

Why does the word "panties" bother so many people?

Sure, when said within the confines of a lingerie store, by an older saleswoman with a tape measure around her neck and glasses slipping down her nose, it's fine: "Did you see the black underwire has the matching panty?" But taken out of this context, the word "panty" can be grimace-inducing—and there are a few possible reasons for that.

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

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If you’ve tried to buy a home in the past two years, you have my most profound sympathies. Your experience has probably gone something like this: You found your dream home online; sent photos around to your family; visited the premises (or decided to buy, sight unseen); got your financial statements in order; smartly offered 10 percent over asking; and learned, several hours later, that no fewer than 831 other people had bid for the same house, which sold to a couple who paid 50 percent over asking, all cash, and cinched the deal with a contract amendment promising to name their firstborn child after the seller.

Yes, the American real-estate market really has been historically hellish, or historically hot, depending on whether you were trying to buy a home or sell one. Within the past year, just about every housing statistic you could imagine set some kind of berserk record. Home prices hit a record high, the share of homes that sold above asking hit a record high, and the number of available homes for sale hit a record low.

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The teenagers are not all right, but then again, neither are the adults. Pandemic life has been profoundly jarring, and every generation has felt it. I hear about people fighting on airplanes and an increase in violent crimes, then I attend my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on Zoom and try to figure out why going back to “normal” is so hard. My 80-year-old mother never got COVID-19, but more than two years of sitting at home seems to have hastened her descent into dementia. Meanwhile, many young children are struggling to keep up with their education or even learn how to socialize.

Last night’s primary in Georgia was a big, fat disappointment for former President Donald Trump: Governor Brian Kemp beat his Trump-endorsed opponent. And in a much more surprising turn of events, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused to play along with Trump’s election-fraud fantasy, won his race too.

Raffensperger defeated Representative Jody Hice—a four-term congressman and a loud supporter of Trump’s election fever dream—by 20 points. Almost no one would have predicted this kind of comeback last year, when all of Trumpworld had trained their ire on Raffensperger. Combined with Kemp’s primary triumph, Raffensperger’s win could suggest that Trump’s influence in Georgia—and voters’ desire to relitigate the 2020 election—is waning. “Raffensperger’s election is a great barometer for the intensity of that issue with Republican voters today,” Brian Robinson, a Georgia Republican political consultant, told me. “It just shows that a lot of the air is out of the balloon. The intensity has dissipated.”

Thoughts and prayers. It began as a cliché. It became a joke. It has putrefied into a national shame.

If tonight, Americans do turn heavenward in pain and grief for the lost children of Uvalde, Texas, they may hear the answer delivered in the Bible through the words of Isaiah:

“And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.”

We will learn more about the 18-year-old killer of elementary-school children: his personality, his ideology, whatever confection of hate and cruelty drove him to his horrible crime. But we already know the answer to one question: Who put the weapon of mass murder into his hand? The answer to that question is that the public policy of this country armed him.

Four days ago, I filled out the paperwork to register my son for kindergarten. After I sent the email—filled with attachments of IDs, birth certificates, proofs of residence, and immunization records—I turned to my wife and said the ultimate parent cliché: “They really grow up so fast.”

I picked up my phone and began scrolling through photos of my son from the day he was born, almost five years ago, his pink-brown body awash with wrinkles and wonder. I kept scrolling and saw photographs of him in the crib where he slept (and too often did not sleep); photographs of him chasing a flock of birds in the park, his arms raised as he toddled toward them with breathtaking inelegance; photographs of him after he had applesauce for the first time, his eyes gleaming, his smile as wide as the sky, his lips covered in a chaos of golden mush.

The school where my son will attend kindergarten is just a few minutes’ walk away from our house. The other day (when his preschool class was closed because of a COVID case) we walked there during lunchtime so that he could see the students at “the big-kid school” he would be attending come fall.

The end of Roe v. Wade would be a devastating defeat for abortion-rights advocates and the millions who support a federally guaranteed right to terminate a pregnancy. It might also be the last, best hope for Democrats seeking to mobilize a frustrated, angry electorate and maintain their slim majorities in Congress this fall.

Democrats appear to have settled on their message for targeting these voters, judging by the ads that the party and its candidates have already produced in the three weeks since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that would overturn the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe. An initial spot from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee opens on an image of matches about to be struck, with a narrator warning: “If Senate Republicans win in November, they will light women’s rights on fire.” Ads from Senators Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, two of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents up for reelection this year, home in on GOP proposals to “criminalize abortion” and ban the procedure with “no exception for rape, incest, or human trafficking.”