Sacramento second-grader brings gun to school, but since no one died, that’s good news?

On just another bloody Tuesday in our country, a Sacramento second-grader brought a gun and loaded magazine to his Meadowview elementary school.

Oh what a relief, district officials said, that nothing worse happened. That on the same day that 19 grade schoolers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered in their classroom, a good second-grader with a gun didn’t have to stop a bad second-grader with a gun?

As parents in Uvalde absorbed the horror from which none of us is immune, President Joe Biden cried out to heaven: “As a nation, we have to ask when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?... What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone? Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake.”

Hearing him call on the Lord in his grief made my Texas friend Joyce Sáenz Harris recall Matthew 2:18: “In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they were no more.”

So what now? The “merchants of death,” as Pope Francis calls the gun industry and their many beneficiaries, have so warped our culture that even after tragedies as hideous as this one, the response in GOP-controlled statehouses around the country has been to make it even easier to buy and carry guns just about anywhere. At 18, rather than 21, as the suspect in Tuesday’s massacre did. Even with a history of domestic violence or serious mental illness, you are not necessarily barred from gun ownership.

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Because let’s face it, in NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s world, there’s really no such thing as a bad man with a gun. And nothing wrong with America, where there are already 120.5 firearms for every 100 people, that a few million more guns wouldn’t fix.

On Wednesday, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who wants to replace Greg Abbott as the governor of Texas, crashed Abbott’s news conference on the shooting and told him, “This is on you,” Abbott mostly avoided looking at his challenger. Which is how Abbott and his party routinely address our gun problem: They just don’t look.

Then the governor went on talking about how the real difficulty is that schools have too many darn doors. So, we have just the right number of AR-style rifles, but an unhealthy number of entrances?

We’re constantly told by the merchants of death and all of their subcontractors that since no single piece of legislation would prevent every gun tragedy, we might as well do nothing. And on days like this, despair is tempting.

Progress is in no way assured if we follow the example of Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after this latest attack, on a bunch of fourth-graders, asked his colleagues, “Why are you here, if not to solve a problem as existential as this?”

We do know this: We’re sure to watch this sick ritual sacrifice to the gods of the gun lobby repeated ad infinitum unless, as Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors said, we let our senators know that they can either stand up against the mayhem or look for other employment.

In our own homes, we can disarm, or at a minimum use the common sense that’s so obviously on holiday when many tragedies occur. Another Tuesday headline: “Ballerina shot to death after husband says she startled him.”

And at the same time, we have to address our even deeper problem, which is that we’ve simply stopped caring about each other.

Our individualism has become so radical that wearing a mask to save granny, much less a stranger, has repeatedly been compared to an abridgment of rights and infliction of suffering on par with the Holocaust.

None of this is out of nowhere; it’s thanks to a sustained and well-financed campaign to convince us that those with whom we disagree are not just wrong, but evil, that lifelong friends no longer speak and displays of ideological othering get lots of likes.

But we all must ask ourselves, just as Murphy asked his Senate colleagues, “What are we doing?” And if we can’t stand up together against this lunacy, why are we here?