My heart goes out to the wounded, the families, the bystanders, the doctors and nurses and ambulance crews and all those who have had to see firsthand what was deliberately done by a human being to other human beings.
My hometown paper had this to say.
It doesn’t matter what party the shooter belonged to. It is the simple truth that the unbalanced among us had been told what to do to get the most attention and to believe they would be praised for it.
The words we choose to represent ourselves by have consequences beyond what we can know or control, and that is especially true in the political sphere. Choosing to have basic common courtesy: is it so hard? It is so essential.
And yet. However one feels about how this all came to be, there is another truth: that we are all in pain, all grieving over the senselessness and the pain and the injury done to individuals and, really, to all of us.
And that speaks to the empathy and the great good in the very great majority of us. We may not personally know any of the people at that scene, but they matter to us as if they were us.
We are all in this life thing together.