Jun 13, 2016 4 min read

Rarely have the idyllic and the appalling mixed as jarringly as they did Sunday.

An almost flawless late spring day, perfect for a picnic, tossing around a Frisbee or toiling in the yard, capped off by the Pittsburgh Penguins winning the Stanley Cup, was punctuated by dreadful updates from Orlando, Fla.

It was hard to square a day tailor-made for diversion with the mounting death toll following the shooting rampage in the early hours of Sunday at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that left 49 people dead and 50 wounded. The shooter, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old fanatic who apparently fell under the spell of a gruesomely warped version of Islam, was finally killed by law enforcement after a three-hour standoff.

The carnage he unleashed inside the nightspot, which catered to a gay and lesbian clientele, far outstripped the U.S.’s previous record-holder for random, unhinged slaughter, that being the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 that left 32 people dead and 17 people injured.

Consider this: Of the 12 deadliest mass shootings in this country’s history, seven have occurred in the last 10 years, from San Bernardino to Sandy Hook.

Silver linings are extraordinarily hard to find following an incident like this, but if there is one, it’s that Americans felt outrage about the scale of the massacre and sympathy for the victims and their families with barely any hints of homophobia creeping into the conversation.

Considering that bars and clubs that catered to gays and lesbians were subject to police raids and official harassment not all that long ago, it highlights how far this country has come in accepting gays and lesbians as friends and neighbors, and recognizing their rights to live and love as they wish.

However, the days ahead promise to be dispiriting. Will there be any action on Capitol Hill to try to limit the availability of the weapons like the ones Mateen used to take so many lives with such great dispatch? Almost certainly not. In the hours after the rampage, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was already peddling the party line of the National Rifle Association and gun-rights absolutists, saying it was Marteen’s ideology that needed to be explored, not the easy availability of guns in the United States. But the fact remains the rifle Marteen used, an AR-15, was designed for the battlefield. It is not designed for hunting deer or other prey. It is meant to kill lots of people with brutal efficiency. In fact, an AR-15 was used in the Sandy Hook killings in 2012, and in the murders at the multiplex in Aurora, Colo., a few months before.

Why can civilians get their hands on these weapons so readily?

Sure enough, Islamophobes will almost certainly try to argue that the actions of one twisted, hot-headed young zealot represent the whole of Islam, completely ignoring the millions of Muslims around the world who live their lives and practice their faith peacefully. Donald Trump, with his call for a ban on non-citizen Muslims entering the United States, sent out a self-congratulatory Twitter message Sunday suggesting he is “right” about terrorism.

He later intimated President Obama is sympathetic to terrorists or knew the attack was coming. As former Jeb Bush aide Tim Miller put it in an interview with the website Politico, “Someone who is so desperate for validation that they need to congratulate themselves after a terrorist attack has psychological issues they need to resolve.”

The quote from philosopher George Santayana about not learning from history and being condemned to repeat it is frequently trotted out. When it comes to America and mass shootings, though, it could hardly be more appropriate