Sure, we can blame pols like Mitch McConnell for Uvalde carnage. But it’s our fault too.

What makes you the most angry?

Nineteen children and two teachers dead in a Texas elementary school 10 days after 10 more people were shot and killed in a Buffalo grocery.

What’s the worst part? Is it a national discussion over Roe v. Wade, in which fetuses must be protected but school children should not? The sheer unbounded hypocrisy of people who call themselves pro-life and then watch wordlessly as children and teenagers and adults are slaughtered by guns every single day in our country? Or voters who think a bunch of cells is more important than your dead second-grader?

Is it a movement that insists that books about the Civil Rights Movement should be taken out of school libraries because they might make your children feel “bad” but active shooter drills are fine? Is it people who insist we need more armed guards in schools? They had one at Robb Elementary School, who didn’t stop the shooter, but maybe there should have been two or five or 10.

Is it politicians like our own Kentucky legislature, which as my colleague Josh Moore pointed out, moves so quickly to pass laws that keep a few transgender kids from playing sports but will do nothing to protect our children from armed madmen? Those politicians include our own Sen. Mitch McConnell, who takes blood money from the National Rifle Association, prevents meaningful reform of gun laws, and then says he is “horrified and heartbroken” by the carnage that he has enabled his whole career.

The truth is we can lay fault at the feet of the death cult known as the NRA, and our craven politicians and our lobbyists, and certainly Sen. Mitch McConnell. But most of all, it’s our fault. Because whenever this happens, we are horrified and appalled. For a few days. And then we normalize it, pretend that nothing can be done, and secretly give a little sigh of relief that it wasn’t our child or grandmother or best friend. And then we go on until it happens the next time. We listened to British political commentator Dan Hodges who wrote: “In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Listen to Shannon Watts, one of the founders of Moms Demand Action, a gun control group. Mass shootings are not acts of nature, like a hurricane, she pointed out. “They’re man-made acts of inaction, of cowardice, of corruption by all lawmakers who refuse to pass laws PROVEN BY DATA to stop preventable, senseless shootings like in Uvalde,” she tweeted on Tuesday.

We can stop this. But it takes enough of us to overcome our torpor, our hopelessness, our inertia, our willingness to believe the lies of the NRA and their worthless ilk. We don’t have to be gaslit anymore to believe a good guy with a gun is better than no guns. (Good guys with guns were on the scene at Uvalde and couldn’t stop the shooter.)

Our Congressman Andy Barr said in a statement “Now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.” Wrong. Now is exactly the time. We have blood on our hands, too, but the answer is in action and organization and voting.

Here’s the site for Moms Demand Action in Ky: https://www.facebook.com/MomsDemandActionKY/. We have to do something. We have to do anything. Thoughts and prayers are cold comfort when your child is lying dead in a pool of blood.