'Don’t be numb to this': Battling despair over gun deaths

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Increasingly it feels like America is at war with itself.

In New Orleans, just days into the new year, a 14-year-old girl was shot to death, along with her father and uncle. A few days after, in a Virginia classroom, a 6-year-old boy pulled out a gun and shot his first-grade teacher. That news was eclipsed by a mass shooting at a California dance studio last weekend that left 11 people dead. A day later and a few hundred miles away, a farmworker opened fire in a beachside town, killing seven coworkers. Three more were killed and four wounded in a shooting at a short-term rental home in an an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood early Saturday.

Just keeping track of all the shootings has become overwhelming, with the locations, circumstances and the names of the victims running together into a seemingly endless trail of bloodshed and grief.

And many Americans are deeply pessimistic that anything will soon change. When President Joe Biden signed a bill last year to fight gun violence — the first such measure to pass Congress in a generation — a substantial majority supported it. But 78% said they believed it would do little or nothing at all, a survey by the Pew Research Center found.

The sheer number of killings and the glacial pace of the political response “breeds a sense of powerlessness and despair,” said Pedro Noguera, the dean of the school of education at the University of Southern California and a sociologist who has studied gun violence for more than two decades.

"I don’t think anybody feels good about where we are at – even gun enthusiasts,” he said.

But if all that might make you think America has gone numb to gun violence, Zeneta Everhart would disagree. Fiercely.

Everhart’s then-19-year-old son, Zaire, was working his part-time job at a...