A journalist and parent reflects on covering the Uvalde school shooting

Really? The dead bodies aren't in the ground yet and they are trying to give lessons on what went wrong. There is a time and place for everything. This discussion needs to wait a bit longer.

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."After each of those massacres and countless others, journalists went out and asked the same questions of the same experts, wrote down the same responses from mostly the same politicians and visited a different set of grieving families.

How could this happen? We’d ask, as if for the first time. How can it stop? These are questions I don’t want to ask anymore, if the answers will never come.

And how could it be that the only question that’s easy to answer is, what happens if my baby never comes home from school?

I’ll never forget the day this week that I read on air the names of the children and teachers who died together in that 4th-grade classroom in Uvalde. When the microphone was finally off, I put my head down on the desk and prayed that my children’s names would never be on such a list.

I’m afraid that’s all that I can do."...