There was another mass shooting last night, this one in a Chesapeake Bay-area Walmart. Using a pistol, the gunman shot dead six people, wounded five more, then killed himself. Police say the suspect was an employee at the store. They say the shooting began in a break room.

We don’t know the shooter’s identity yet, but we do know last night marked the seventh mass shooting in seven days, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks and makes available information on gun-related violence. Investigators are still determining a motive for the violence. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.

The gunman’s motive doesn’t matter because whatever it is in detail, the urge to murder expressed itself from inside a political context that’s already highly tolerant of spectacular rates of political violence. The Gun Violence Archive reports an estimated 600 gun-related incidents of mass death so far this year. That’s nearly two daily.

Whether, over 20 years, the bodies piled skyward came from criminals shattering the peace or from police officers “keeping the peace” – one […]