A sign  welcoming students and staff back to Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Despite crime scene tape still being stretched around large areas of the school, the campus was open to staff and students on Monday for the first time since last Thursday when 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer went on a shooting rampage, killing nine people and wounding another nine before he was killed. Classes are not scheduled to resume until next week.

By Dan K Thomasson/Washington/Tribune News Service
Here we are again trying to make sense out of a culture that supports the unfettered dissemination of instruments meant mainly for killing something.
The presidency of the US is a “nonstarter” when it comes to guns, an impotent office that hasn’t a prayer of changing the concept that “stuff happens” but not because of firearms.
We are expected to tolerate the latest massacre as just the price of maintaining our constitutional rights in the US.
Besides, the real problem is mental health. That’s the latest explanation from those who put weapons of mass destruction ahead of humanity. Are they saying that we should find people with potential violent personalities and shoot them in advance of the next horrific incident? It seems that way.
The spokesmen for those who justify mass murder, so the manufacturers can sell more weapons to bring it about would deny that inference.
But it sure appears they would like to take such a step as the final solution to their opposition. No more restrictive laws they say (fully aware that the chance of that occurring is practically non-existent). Just get rid of the crazies who misuse their product, the only commercial one with its own protective amendment.
They don’t have to shoot opponents in Congress. There are very few. Why waste ammunition? Just buy them off like they have the rest of the members and give them lifetime memberships in the National Rifle Association (NRA) at whose altar millions of Americans worship, many of whom obviously do so by cleaning their battlefield beauties regularly in preparation for the next major event.
When that takes place, as it will, they can rush to their nearest gun dealer and buy more in case three or four aren’t enough when the horror reaches them or under the belief that this time anti-gun forces finally will cut off their supply. The boogeyman will get them.
There is scant evidence that even a proximity to a mass incident by gun bearing “civilians” has altered the outcome. These defenders of the faith who have put their trust not in God but the NRA may want to examine the warnings about false prophecy. Or if not, follow those who have fled the scene in panic, their guns forgotten, when all hell has broken loose.
Wyatt Earps they ain’t.
So what now in the wake of the latest example of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Should you do what Barack Obama suggests and make certain that you vote against any member of the House or Senate who doesn’t make gun reform a priority, who doesn’t say we need expanded background checks and a meaningful restriction on semi-automatic weapons and so forth?
Probably. But the odds are against that rational appeal. The tragedies of Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary and the Memphis Church and Virginia Tech and the Aurora Theatre and the Navy Yard and on and on and on in one degree or another without action certify that as a losing cause.
Can we count on the Supreme Court to put aside its disastrous ruling that made a clearly collective right and individual one? Ha. Let’s see. How old are Justices Scalia and Thomas?
What we are left with is clearly the expectation that somewhere in our midst another person with a grudge against humanity, or a terrorist or a paranoid psychopath is waiting, using the Internet to wet his appetite for destruction, just as the latest shooter did, and ready to satisfy his diseased mind or twisted motives by feeding on the literature of hate and despair ubiquitous on the electronic textbook of the 21st century.
It is so enormously depressing to consider the outcome of all this irresponsibility, to know with near certainty that with 350mn firearms in circulation and unrestricted access to them even by the most unbalanced around us, it is inevitable that what happened at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, is bound to be repeated.
Perhaps after every episode our reaction should be that of Republican presidential nominee Jeb Bush. “Stuff happens,” he said. That of course has been the attitude of most of this nation’s politicians whose cringing fear of the gun lobby has left us bereft over the death of young and not so young innocents once again.
Indeed stuff happens. But it happens here too often.

♦ Dan Thomasson is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service and a former vice president of Scripps Howard Newspapers. Readers may send him e-mail at: danthomasson@verizon.net