Ed Burmila has been one of my favorite politics writers because he's able and willing to cut through all the performative BS and get to the heart of the matter.

THE ADJECTIVE AND THE NOUN:

The tidal wave of condemnations of Political Violence this week are deeply revealing of the narcissism, callousness, and selfishness of our elected officials and their friends in the highest tiers of the media. It is abundantly clear that this has shaken them to their core, watching a man they can easily see as themselves being gunned down by one of the thousands if not millions of addled people with unfettered access to guns in this country.

Local governments run for decades by a coalition of cops and real estate developers designate Sacrifice Zones of poverty and neglect where we are free to go and kill each other and that's more or less fine provided the bloodshed doesn't break containment.

The deal is unambiguous: have all the guns you care to own and shoot them at whoever makes you mad but never point them at us. That is the agreement. That is the social contract. Go ahead and kill each other. We accept that. We expect that. Some of us even demand that. Just leave us out of it to swan around through life laughing and back-slapping and rubbing elbows and signing book deals and retiring to Spend More Time With Our Families who always look suspiciously like lobbyists. We may have created a society of universal, inescapable, unpredictable violence but we do not live in it with you. You are trapped in it. We hover above it.

I want to live in a society where people don't have to worry about getting shot every time they leave the house. I have no interest in living in one where that statement is true excepting a special class of special people who are exempt from the risks.

That, at its most basic level, is what a society is. We share the risks. Either we all cower in fear or nobody does. Either we all have a ticket in the Mass Shooter Lotto or nobody does. The older I get, the more I wonder if this is in fact my core belief, the closest someone as verbose as me can come to distilling an ideology: I do not believe that anyone is special. Any risk we expect a second-grader to accept should be expected of the rich and powerful, too. That isn't too much to ask. That's not unreasonable and nothing should cow any of us into pretending that we believe it is.

This country is sick with violence and callousness toward it. With that much of what the current crop of haigiographers and hand-wringers is saying, I agree unconditionally. But when I see pleas that amount to little more than "Leave us out of it, we are off-limits," I'm not interested and no amount of whitewashing it will convince me to become so. I'm sorry violence has come for the politically prominent, and no sorrier than I am that it long ago came for everyone they believe is beneath them.