An American holiday
By 
And a happy new year:
The horror of a mass school shooting struck the Madison area for the second time in seven months on Monday, when police say a teenager shot eight people before taking their own life at a private Christian school.
In total, a student and teacher were killed and six students were injured. Two of them are in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, and four suffered injuries that weren’t life-threatening, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said at a midafternoon news conference.
Shock and grief reverberated across Wisconsin as news of the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School spread. As police methodically cleared the school, which sits on a 28-acre campus with a preschool and a church, city buses took students to a nearby clinic serving as a reunification point. Some peered out the bus windows, waving to reporters gathered nearby.
It’s hard not to become completely numb to the fact that the Party of Life (TM) insists on accepting these mass shootings as a fact of life, but it’s really not some inevitability even if there’s no viable short-term solution.