Another Day In Gunmerica

There was a brutal and deadly mass shooting in Texas on Sunday and we've finally reached the point where something like that is no longer national news when it gets dismissed as a domestic violence incident that nobody wants to talk about.

Nine people are dead, including the gunman, after he opened fire on a football watching party at a Plano home Sunday night. 

The unidentified suspect was shot and killed by an officer who arrived at the home on West Spring Creek Parkway just after 8 p.m.

Monday afternoon Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin held a press conference to notify media that an eighth victim had died at the hospital. The toll now stands at nine, including the gunman. 

Rushin says an officer found bodies in the yard and heard shots coming from inside the house. 

The Texas Rangers are assisting with the investigation, especially since it involved an officer, who Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin says went into the house by himself and stopped the shooter before waiting for backup. 

"[He] made entry inside the house, confronted the suspect, ultimately shooting and killing him," Plano PD Officer David Tilley said. 

It is unclear whether the gunman returned fire. Rushin tells us multiple guns were recovered from the home. 

Monday, flowers marked the spot of the most unthinkable event to happen in the most unlikeliest of places -- Plano. 

"We've never had a shooting of this magnitude. We've never seen this many victims before," Chief Rushin said. 

Behind the police tape outside the home are still cars that line up against the road marking the spot of the shooting. These are the cars of the victims who did not make it home. 

Lane told WFAA that her daughter, 27-year-old Meredith Hight, owned the home and had recently filed for divorce from her husband. She says he showed up at her daughter's home and opened fire.

"As time passed we assumed the worst," said Meredith's mother Debbie Lane.

Even the real lede of the story is buried nearly ten paragraphs deep: the shooter was recently divorced from one of the victims and he showed up with a gun and slaughtered everyone before a police officer was able to shoot and kill him.

No national outpouring of grief, and after Harvey and Irma (and Jose on the way) maybe we don't have much grief left, but this was unfathomably tragic.  It wasn't terrorism.  It wasn't Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  It wasn't any of the usual bogeymen the right blame for this.

It was a pissed off guy with a gun who went to his wife's place where he knew she would be watching football and killed eight people, a cowardly, despicable act of a truly evil person.

We don't have just a domestic terrorism problem in America, we have a domestic violence problem in America, and in both cases firearms only make these problems exponentially more deadly.