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Coming of Age In Terrorist Times

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- "Mommy, what did the news used to be about before it was about terrorism?"

That was my younger daughter, snuggling in bed a few weeks after 9/11. She was then 4, and, granted, there was probably more consumption of news in our home than was healthy.

Fourteen years later, that toddler is a college freshman, too cool to snuggle and too far away even if she were so inclined. But her question remains sadly relevant.

"It's really scary to grow up in a time when mass killings happen this often," she texted Wednesday afternoon, as the latest active shooting situation was still unfolding.

And, knowing her mom, "Are you gonna write about it?"

What, I asked, should I say? "Maybe how when things like this happen so frequently it desensitizes people to violence," she texted. "My friend came into my room and I was watching the news and they were showing footage from what happened today. And she just looks at the TV and goes, 'It's hard to be sad about stuff like this when it happens every other week.'''

 

If only the carnage were that infrequent.

Indeed, her older sister checked in Thursday morning from London, where she is concluding a semester abroad, quoting The New Yorker: "Week by week, or recently, hour by hour, we tally the carnage." How happy am I to have a New Yorker-reading child; how terrible that this is what she reads.

The columnist's instinct is to examine an issue and propose solutions -- if not perfect fixes, at least half-measures. And so, in response to mass shootings, I have written about tightening background checks and limiting magazine sizes; about cracking down on domestic abusers and requiring trigger locks.

Today, I find myself suggestion-free, just sad. Despairing might not be too strong a word. My daughter's friend notwithstanding, I don't think we are desensitized by this killing. We are depressed -- by its omnipresence, by its persistence, by its multiplicity of sources, whether right-wing extremists, disaffected high school students, or, yes, from Islamist terrorists, home-grown and overseas.

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