To open every school day at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, someone reads what they call an “affirmation” – likely an innocuous and uplifting aphorism – over the intercom. Wednesday was no different.

“Life supports me in every way possible,” were the first words students heard that day, several stories tell us.

Just hours later students were forced to step over the bodies of their dead schoolmates as they fled the building.

Seventeen people died, and a number of the 14 others wounded are in critical condition.

And so it starts, the mournful wall-to-wall coverage of a school shooting. Another school shooting. And not for the first time just this year, 2018. There have been several earlier shootings, including one last month, when a shooter in a Kentucky school killed two people and wounded at least 18.

We really don’t know the number of people killed or wounded by gunfire in schools because there is no single statistic keeper. Different non-governmental organizations – from Everytown for Gun Safety to a privately maintained database called the Gun Violence Archive – have dramatically different numbers, using drastically different definitions of what counts as a “school shooting.”

But the bottom line is that schools are supposed to be among the safest places in most American communities. There should be no school shootings.

And if school shootings are “the new normal,” according to the former Boston police commissioner and New York City police chief, Bill Bratton, other American mass shootings have increased in volume and ferocity as well. In 2016, the country was horrified when a lone gunman slaughtered 49 people and wounded 58 others in an Orlando nightclub. It was then said to be the worst mass shooting in our recent history.

But the record was toppled when, just last summer, we witnessed the horrific Las Vegas massacre. A well-armed gunman barricaded himself in a high hotel tower room and methodically picked off his victims on the ground – 58 dead, another 851 wounded. Nearly1,000 people shot in perhaps 10 minutes.

Now that is the country’s worst mass shooting. And we can be sure that somewhere in this great country another deranged soul is rehearsing an even more stomach-churning performance. He, like the rest, will have little trouble getting the firepower to carry it out.

The U. S. is now said to have more guns than people. And these guns aren’t just like the flintlocks and muskets early Americans used for protections in the wilderness or the rifles and pistols that were legendary in the old West. They really are often formidable weapons of war, capable of massive, rapid gunfire.

“This is not the time” to discuss even minimal attempts to enact new gun laws, says Paul Ryan and virtually the entire Republican Congress, repeating an excuse that is so old it has cobwebs.

We all know this means nothing – nothing – will be done. Even the Republicans who say it know that nothing will be done.

The Republican Party today is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRA, a ruthless lobbying organization which is itself a totally controlled adjunct of gun manufacturers, gun dealers and all the others who happily profit from the tsunami of weapons sloshing around the country.

And the Democratic Party shouldn’t pat itself on the back. While the party’s overall policy stance and leaders are generally (and some ferociously) for sensible gun regulation, not all party members fall into line, to say the least.

The Obama administration sort of nibbled around the edges of the gun problem, but it still couldn’t get agreement on significant measures, even after the horrific massacre at the Sandy Hook school.

Bess Kalb – found at @bessbell – is a writer for Jimmy Kimmel as well as a New Yorker contributor. Last week she fired off a scathing series of tweets giving the totals of contributions to a roster of gun-happy congressmen who took massive money – millions and millions of dollars – from the NRA to defend its interests. Check it out. It’s disgraceful.

But shaming these people doesn’t do a bit of good. Look at our president, who campaigned pledging his fealty to the NRA. After the shootings in Florida, Trump – as he did after the horrific massacre in Las Vegas – offered his “prayers and condolences to the families of the victims.” And Thursday – in a longer message read with great care from a teleprompter – he condemned “violence, evil and hatred.”

But, despite a fleeting reference to “reports of gunfire” alerting police, he not once – not even a single time – used the word “guns,” the infernal instruments that make this carnage possible.

Earlier he’d said the gunman was “mentally disturbed,” and in his statement vowed to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”

But he completely ignored the fact that within two months of assuming office he quietly – very quietly but very deliberately – signed a bill into law revoking an Obama-era rule that would have blocked some mentally ill people from buying guns.

My husband and I greatly admire the stalwart souls who continue slogging along, working for even minimal measures that might marginally cut down on the slaughter. We support them financially and admire their optimism. They are on the side of the angels as far as we’re concerned.

But we’ve given up hope of progress toward gun sanity in the foreseeable future.

Five years ago, a deeply disturbed young man with a powerful semi-automatic rifle simply slaughtered 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn. If that horrific act couldn’t move our national lawmakers to action, not anything – not scores of dead in Orlando or Las Vegas or 17 people at a pleasant high school in Florida – can change the gun lobby’s sovereignty.

But, as my husband likes to remind me, this uncontrollable, incomprehensible slaughter is – or so we are often told – simply the price of freedom. Of liberty, of the American way. Surely a roomful of school children now and again isn’t too much to pay, is it?

And by that measure, we have more “freedom” now than any other developed nation on earth.

God bless America!

(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)