The Gun Lobby’s Most Cynical Move Yet

As a newspaper reporter, I covered my first school shooting in 2007 at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty were murdered and 17 others were wounded.

In one story , I recounted how Emily, a 19-year-old sophomore, was lying partially behind a desk on the floor of her French class while the shooter gunned down her teacher and nearly every student around her before shooting himself in the head.

I can’t forget the image of Emily, shot twice herself, who pretended to be dead but surreptitiously grabbed a cellphone on the floor that another student had used to call 911 before he was shot.

I listened many weeks later to a recording of the call.

At first, she was too terrified to speak.

All the police dispatcher could hear was the sound of her breath and the loud pop pop pop of gunfire all around her.

“I can’t talk,” she whispered, gasping for breath.

“Please hurry.” After the Virginia Tech massacre, I reported on many other school shootings, including Sandy Hook in 2012, when twenty 6- and 7-year-olds were shot to death in their first-grade classrooms and six staff members were killed.

Attorney General Eric Holder, whom I covered at the time as The Washington Post ’s Justice Department reporter, told me that walking through the bullet-riddled classrooms still caked with blood was the most difficult day of his professional life.

He later cried openly when he saw the crime-scene photos of the children lying dead in their classrooms.

I wrote about so many school massacres that I lost count.

After each one, I reached out to the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the gun industry’s trade association), and other organizations that the nation’s gun lobby comprises for their response.

They rarely commented beyond a statement offering thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families.

I twice attended the world’s largest firearms trade show, held annually in Las Vegas for tens of thousands of gun makers, sellers, and other professionals but closed to the general public.