An 18-year-old student used an assault rifle to kill 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde County, Texas. Photo: REUTERS

The easy thing to say is it’s beyond words. And thus being beyond articulation, it is indescribable. How do you articulate a massacre? How do you articulate massacre after massacre after massacre? For that is what is happening in America.

There have been 212 massacres in the United States this year, that’s more than days have passed. (A massacre is defined by the FBI as four or more people injured or killed by a gunman.)

Just over a week ago, I wrote on this website on the mass shooting in Buffalo, in which 18-year-old Payton Gendron travelled 300 kilometres from his home in New York to kill people at a black supermarket. He killed 10. He was caught, and charged. He has pleaded not guilty. He used an assault rifle, a Bushmaster, which he bought legally.

I wonder what he thinks of Salvador Ramos, the latest mass murderer of innocents. Ramos used an AR-15 assault rifle to kill 19 schoolkids and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County in Texas. We’ll never know what Ramos was thinking as he shot dead the kids. He was shot dead himself. Uvalde is a speck on the map, little more than 15,000 residents. He was a resident.

Massacres have no frontiers in America, and the consequences of the legislatures in various states has no moral thread to it, and no logic. Gun proponents argue that it has on the basis if it’s a free country then men and women must in absolute fealty to that concept be free to own a gun. But a gun is not a dog or a cat. Apart from clay shooting, guns rip apart living things. They destroy.

In the past decade, Texas has been the scene of numerous mass shootings. In 2009, an Army psychiatrist shot dead 13 at Fort Hood. In 2014, another soldier shot dead three and injured 12. In 2017, a man shot dead 26 and injured 20 at a Baptist church. In 2018, a student, aged 17, shot eight pupils and two teachers dead at Santa Fe High. The next year a 21-year-old killed 23 and wounded 25 in El Paso. The same month, August, seven were shot dead and 25 injured in Odessa.

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And what has been the legislative reaction to this slaughter? Gun laws have become looser. From 2016, Texans have been allowed to carry guns openly, as they are in other districts nationwide. It could be argued this path is one of mutual assured destruction. No one will shoot another if everyone has a firearm at their side. Recent history has shown this to be murderously wrong. The slain have been unarmed.

And the slain in this latest massacre were school kids. They were about to go on summer holidays.

The tragedy beyond the immeasurable one of those killed and their relatives’ grief is that the heartrending pleas of the sane members of American society, that is those who want gun control, can speak loudly and with deep anguish, and nothing changes.

Even from this distant shore, it breaks your heart.

US President Joe Biden, in a tacit acceptance of his inability to effect change, said: “As a nation, we have to ask — when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Quite.

There are voices. Such as Democrat Chris Murphy, who once represented Sandy Hook, the site of a school massacre in 2012 that took 26 lives, said: “This isn’t inevitable. These kids weren’t ‘unlucky’. This only happens in this country, and nowhere else. Nowhere else do kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day.

“Nowhere else, do parents have to talk to their kids as I have had to do, about why they got locked into a bathroom and got told to be quiet for five minutes, just in case a bad man entered that building.

“Nowhere else does that happen except here in the United States of America. And it is a choice. It is our choice to let it continue.”

But that’s the thing, the country is awash with guns. There are 120 firearms for every 100 people, three times more than any other country in the world.

For every massacre, for every new well of grief, there is the shadow of this: the hammer shapes the hand. That is the tragedy of America.