Thursday night at the White House, speaking to America with grim emotion, President Joe Biden used a single statistic to sum up two decades of national pain and revulsion we have all endured. His one statistic also seemed to sum up the horror of our last two weeks of mass-killings – in the Buffalo grocery store, the Tulsa hospital and especially the heart-wrenching record slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.
One statistic: “Over the last two decades, more school-aged children have died from guns than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined,” Biden told America. “For God’s sake, how much more carnage are we willing to accept? How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say ‘enough’? Enough.”
“Enough” – Biden used the word 12 times in a 17 minute speech that was probably the most purposeful and powerful of his presidency. Yet, the very next day we began to see signs that even his best-ever speech may not have been “enough.”
