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This is what it’s come to — there are now Americans who have lived through two gun massacres. Many of the people who were able to flee a California bar where a man shot dozens of people late Wednesday night had also survived an attack last year in which a gunman in a Las Vegas hotel fired down on a music festival, killing 58 people. But at least one of the Las Vegas survivors was among the dead at the bar. (11/8)

Americans woke Thursday morning to the sickening news of yet another mass shooting. The crime offered a kind of tragic punctuation to a message that midterm voters sent their government on Tuesday. That message: It is time to do more than lower flags and send thoughts and prayers. This time the carnage was at a country-western dance hall in Thousand Oaks, in Southern California. This time, 12 people, including an unflinching first responder, were gunned down. “The young kids, they were just having a good time. . . . Enjoying themselves. None of them deserved this at all,” one shellshocked witness told CNN. (11/8)

In the wake of almost every mass shooting — a term which, by now, has become so familiar as to feel almost disconnected from the vicious slaughter of random people in ordinary places — the National Rifle Association and its fellow travelers make the same point: There are many more guns in circulation in the United States than murders, so the problem isn’t guns, per se, but the people who turn them on innocents. The problem, they say, is mental health. (Elizabeth Bruenig, 11/8)

Politicians, particularly at the federal level, could respond to these killings with common-sense gun laws that establish universal background checks and ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. (California outlaws both, but both are readily available in neighboring states like Nevada.) But Congress remains paralyzed when it comes to sensibly limiting the nation's growing arsenal of firearms and mass-killing accessories.  So the rampages continue, and selfless police officers like Sgt. Ron Helus elect to move toward the gunfire to limit the dying, even if it means they might die themselves. (11/8)