The revolting deja vu of Uvalde, Columbine and the National Rifle Association

It used to be enough to make a person with a sensitive digestive system want to vomit.

But that is not us anymore.

There was a time when news of a mass shooting set off a cramping reflux in our guts and the acid burned up into our throats.

These days, however, we no longer taste the bile.

We’ve gotten used to it.

Sometimes, it seems we even enjoy the tang.

So, what happened when the National Rifle Association held its 1999 convention in Denver only a few weeks after the massacre at nearby Columbine High School won’t be anything like what happens as the NRA holds this year’s convention in Houston only days after the massacre in an elementary school in nearly Uvalde.

Except for one thing:

Th NRA’s revoltingly cold-blooded determination to go on with the show in spite of the carnage.

Something awful and incomprensible

That has not changed.

In late April of 1999 I went to Littleton, Colo. Dozens of other journalists were already there. Hundreds.

A few days earlier two armed young men, one 18 and one 17, walked into Columbine High School and opened fire, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding more than 20 others.

It was a national, even international, gut punch, taking the air out of us.

Something awful and incomprehensible had happened, and it wasn’t only about two disaffected high school kids but that they had easy access to all manner of firearms.

So when the NRA decided that it was going ahead with its planned convention, in spite of the nearby gun violence, thousands of protesters turned up.

I spoke at the time to a man named Merrill Evans, from Littleton, who told me, “I simply can’t understand it. The NRA, out of respect, should have canceled all of their convention programs here, not just some of them. But no. They bring (actor and then-NRA president) Charlton Heston and others into town and it’s like rubbing the violence and the evil in our faces, and we won’t stand for it.”

I also talked to an NRA supporter named Rick Reeser, who wore an NRA ball cap and was carrying a sign reading “Clinton & Cronies Capitalize on Columbine Killings.” He said of the protesters, “These people have been brainwashed. I’m here to tell them that Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than my gun.”

Yes, the NRA is going on with the show

At the convention, Heston told a cheering crowd, “Each horrible act can’t become an ax for opportunists to cleave the very Bill of Rights that binds us.”

He needn’t have worried.

Over the intervening years the incomprehensible has become commonplace. And the NRA, along with the massive firearms industry behind it, has fought off any attempt to prevent it.

So, it is no surprise that the NRA convention in Houston will go on.

There will be some protests, of course. But nothing like what happened in Denver all those years ago.

And the Republicans in the pocket of the gun lobby will, for the most part, happily show up. With former President Donald Trump at the top of the list.

Even worse, in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre the same Republican politicians who believe our teachers can't be trusted to carry out history lessons in the classroom now want them to carry guns.

When grief loses its freshness

The morning that the NRA convention was to open in Denver in 1999, I drove first to Littleton, where I’d been a few weeks earlier.

Much of the public grieving seemed to happen in a place called Clement Park, not far from the high school.

I was there just before dawn. I noted at the time that there still were bouquets of flowers everywhere, and that the saplings that lined West Bowles Avenue were covered with ribbons and drooped under the weight of teddy bears and mementoes left by visitors.

It had been a few weeks since the killings and dozens of deflated balloons that had been attached to the trees now hung like withered fruit, as if mourning had lost its freshness.

Because it had.

Because it has.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Uvalde, Columbine and the NRA make for revolting deja vu