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Article snippet: “God bless America,” our president said, dutifully, after the bloody Sunday in Las Vegas. It’s a wish worth repeating. It’s an intervention sorely needed in a country seriously lost. God bless America, where shock over a torrent of bullets that sends dozens more to the morgue doesn’t last, if indeed there’s shock at all. This kind of violence is no longer exceptional. But we are. No other affluent country can match our massacres or, in the face of them, our paralysis. We stand out boldly in this regard. We lead. God bless America, awash in self-delusion. House Speaker Paul Ryan responded to the horror in Las Vegas by saying that “what truly defines us” are the acts of heroism we learned of, while the shooting itself “is not who we are.” How does he figure that? Las Vegas was one of the worst but hardly the first. And it demands more than the gauzy pieties and press-a-button platitudes that too many politicians spout. God bless America, where the juxtaposition of two articles published by this section of this newspaper on Monday said it all. The first was pictorial, a calendar that captured all the mass shootings in the United States since June 12, 2016, when gunfire ruptured the party in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. There had been 521 in 477 days. Last March was a curious lull. Just 22 mass shootings then. The second article was by Steve Israel, a former congressman, and its transcendent point was in its terrifying headline: “Nothing Will Change After the... Link to the full article to read more