Four years after Giffords shooting, a shocking lesson

It's been four years since a gunman north of Tucson used a weapon with a high-capacity magazine to fire 31 shots in 15 seconds, killing six people and wounding 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The day it happened I wrote a column that began, "The 'who,' 'what,' 'when,' 'where' and 'how' were answered quickly. The 'why' we may never know."

And we don't. We almost never do with attacks like this. Not really.

There was lots of conjecture after the massacre about the impact the shooting would have on the national psyche, on Congress, on gun laws. Only the negative predictions came true.

Not long after the attack, Kelly O'Brien, the fiancé of murdered Giffords' staffer Gabe Zimmerman said, "Extended magazine clips are currently an easily accessible weapon for troubled individuals to use in mass murder. That is what happened on Jan. 8 ... This must not be allowed to happen again."

Dallas Green, former Philadelphia Phillies manager and grandfather of murdered 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, added, "I don't have a Glock or whatever it is, and I don't have a magazine with 33 bullets in it. That doesn't make sense for me to be able to sell those kinds of things. I guess I never thought about it until this happened. What reason is there to have those kinds of guns other than to kill people?"

A bill was filed in the Arizona Legislature to limit gun clips to 10 rounds.

It didn't pass.

Instead, a month or so after the mass shooting 40 Arizona legislators signed on as sponsors for a bill to designate the Colt Single Action Army Revolver as the state's firearm. It passed and Gov. Jan Brewer signed it.

On the one year anniversary of the shooting I wrote about how we seemed to have forgotten all about the incident, adding, "There was never any chance we'd be polite and respectful after the shooting rampage that nearly took Giffords' life, wounded 12 others and killed six. We talked about being more civil. And we were — for a little while. But we knew it wouldn't last.

"Even as our hearts broke over revelations about victims… we knew we weren't going to change the way we spoke to one another, or about one another, especially when it came to politics. And if anything, it's going to get worse."

And it has. Instead of coming together to find common sense solutions to gun violence we've grown more fractured. And more callous.

Four years ago we were shocked and horrified by the news. If I'd been asked to predict anything in those first terrible days I would have said that an event like that would always, always, leave us shocked and horrified.

And I would have been wrong.

There have been many mass shootings since Tucson. Including the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six adults. And which led us to do, essentially, nothing.

It's not that we haven't learned a lesson from what happened here in 2011. We have. We learned that horrific incidents like this no longer shock us.