(NewsNation) — Gun violence has once again afflicted America, this time in Louisville, Kentucky.

It’s amazing how good America has gotten at dealing with the tragedy. I don’t mean in dealing with any of the aspects that come up every time that could be helped with various legal, administrative and therapeutic fixes, but in terms of how well we process them.

Following the shooting, the script was followed to a T because our only response really is the news conference. There’s a phalanx of local officials, with the introductions and then the TPs — thoughts and prayers.

I just abbreviate it because they are gestures that end after being spoken. Not that people don’t mean it, but they just won’t do anything that might be motivated by actual thought about the problem or praying for how to help.

Isn’t that just the truth? Was today any different? I don’t blame the people in crisis, or even NewsNation readers and viewers. I blame myself. I add to a personal inventory of why I suck because if it were my family, I would likely be obsessed, and while I talk about us being interconnected, I just play along like rest, don’t I?

Back to the news conference. We now have to make sure we say we did what we could. So then we go to the timing of first responders, whom we say we love and respect but then send into hellscapes so often they that train on it and can now stop a shooter in minutes.

They have to because we exist in the twilight zone where we say we can’t do anything about something that happens here more than anywhere else in the world, and we know exactly why.

While we all say we want to keep people more safe, we can’t even get our schools secured because that plays into the idea of more guns. More guns, more bad, unless you’re on the right and you say more guns, more good. But neither is true. As if we’re ever going to get rid of guns.

So, all we have are the cops, and you’ll hear that police saved lives. Not that that’s a real goal, but it is almost always true — minus a Uvalde here and there — because they are all we have in these situations.

So we then go to the thanks for how well state and local officials worked together. My friend said that these now sound like Oscar speeches where everyone gets congratulated for a problem we do nothing about.

Then you have to deal with the dead and injured. There are not nearly enough here to warrant you seeing the likes of me being sent to Louisville — I used to go every time, but now, it is mostly a numbers game that decides coverage.

I don’t criticize the reality. I just can’t believe that shame hasn’t driven us to change it. Because that’s the reality, isn’t it? Hard to say.

That leads me to the next element, which is don’t say anything that suggests that we should be doing something about this not now, because it’s too soon, insensitive. Just stick with a social media hashtag.

Louisville, I suspect like most communities, is strong, and people will have to lean on one another. They will have to because the senselessness is almost overwhelming, and we will all move on so they will only have each other.

But before we move on, we will hear from the victims’ families, and they want to tell us just how much was lost with this person, and how destroyed their family is, and how the only thing that may give them solace is if they could do anything to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We will give them their say, but that’s all we’ll give them.

In this case, we have injured officers and we have a governor who has a personal connection to one of the deceased. So, the governor is going to speak to that and his connection here to the community and to one of the deceased and this will bring it home in more ways than one.

The governor in Kentucky is a Democrat but he’s still in Kentucky, and that means that while he is upset, he will defer to the personal pain and not really make the mistake of discussing any sense of putting that pain to purpose here.

I am not criticizing the governor, or the other local officials, not because I’m afraid to, but because what else can you expect from them? Their constituents aren’t asking for change. There’s more of a pride in holding the line against this perverse perception of infringement of rights.

There’s also a messy matter of HIPAA compliance and messing with peoples’ personal privacy if you try to force them to get help or have mental health matter in any real way when it comes to getting a gun.

So, what can we do? The assault ban is tough to assess, but it didn’t make it worse. Restricting high-capacity cartridges helps, but that angers the National Rifle Association.

That takes us to the shooter. Even though this is not in a school, shooters almost always check some or more of the following boxes: on the younger side, more often white male, will have been noticed by one or more people to have recently have been self-isolating, spiraling, resisting treatment, forgetting treatment, stopping treatment, and the same with medication. More likely than not, they will have some type of referenced, psychological or emotional struggle.

But when the shooting first happens, people who knew them will be shocked because they were probably not that close to them, at least not recently, and the people who were don’t want to go on TV right away if at all because they to start to feel guilty about this problem, even though they were likely all but powerless to do anything about it.

In preparing for my show Monday night, my staff wanted me to have a couple of people on who worked with this shooter a year or so ago. They say they’re shocked, they never thought anybody like this would ever do anything like this, etc.

Does that really advance our understanding? Isn’t that always the case?

You don’t need hollow reassurance that this can’t be just anybody who does something like this, that these people are different from the rest of us. But when are we going to see that that’s just not the case? It could happen anywhere, because every community is vulnerable to the exact same weaknesses and blind spots that we have apparently everywhere.

And of course, unless it is a gang-related shooting, the weapon of choice is an AR-15. Gun restrictions don’t matter because there’s so many semiautomatic rifles, so where would you draw the line as to which ones to prohibit? Even though you look at the statistics, and you don’t see a lot of people hunting or sport, shooting or really doing anything for home protection with these, but they sure love them for mass shootings.

There’s also going to be a good chance that this person got the weapon legally or got it because someone else who got it legally didn’t know how to store it or take care of it or secure it.

The cumulative stats are just embarrassing. There have been at least 146 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Project, which measures “mass shooting” if at least four people lose their lives. Last year at this time, there were 130 mass shootings. For the 2022 year, they counted 647 mass shootings.

You’re not going to stop all of them, but aren’t you going to try and stop some of them? Because the stats are also set against the idea that no single law could’ve stopped this, and you’re right. You never give a lot of weight to any single factor explanation to a complicated situation, so why don’t you just try to do everything that you can? How do you justify doing nothing?

The argument is always the Second Amendment. About 30% to 35% of the electorate consider it to be as important as anything any founding father ever discussed at any point, even though a five-minute Google search will reveal that the Second Amendment is nothing like what they believe it to be in terms of its origination and orientation.

But again, by the time President Joe Biden weighs in about how he and first lady Jill feel about this, and really hope the Republicans will want to do something this time, the story has just about moved on, hasn’t it?

And there are many of you maybe waiting for me to move on, but I can’t. I have to take the occasion to remind us how uniquely shameful the situation is. We have never surrendered to anything the way we have to this problem. I’ve never seen us do less.

I’m not saying that there are not plenty of regulations, but we’re clearly not doing what we need to do to target exactly the kind of people that do the shootings that we care about the most.

I’m sorry I burdened you with this. I shouldn’t have spent this much time on the topic. You know why?

We’ll be able to visit it again, and real soon.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.