When a mass shooting happens, even when it happens twice in a 24-hour period - even when the death toll soars into the dozens - we reflexively spring into action. We describe the horror of what happened, we profile the shooter, we tell about the victims' lives, we get reaction from public officials.
It's difficult, gut-wrenching work for those journalists who are on the scene.
If journalism is supposed to be a positive force in society - and we know it can be - this is doing no good. Nothing changes. If anything, the pace of these tragedies is on the rise, as Saturday’s El Paso, Texas, massacre, so quickly followed by the one Sunday near Dayton, Ohio, seemed to prove.