America’s kids are failed again

A more heartrending and quintessentially American scene is hard to imagine.

A human chain of children, hand-in-hand, shepherded by police officers, fled the latest school struck by unfathomable tragedy. On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the roster of cities made notorious by a mass shooting epidemic much of the country seems prepared to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms.

The reality of what unfolded inside was inhuman, but it can unfortunately be imagined given the gruesome insider accounts that emerged from previous school shootings – in Uvalde, Texas, last year, or at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012.

Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all nine years old, were gunned down by a shooter armed with two AR-style weapons and a handgun, two of which police said were bought legally. Their names – known only to the rest of America in death – were released by police about the same time as they should have been going home from Covenant School for the day.

Three staff, all half a century older, also died. They were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

They were all murdered in the place that should be the safest: where kids go to school. But a plague of recent classroom rampages, distinguished even among America’s gun violence by their depravity, shows that nowhere is really secure. That’s why millions of parents often drop their kids off with a nagging fear about whether their school is next. And it’s why a generation of kids has endured active shooter drills that will mark them – just as children halfway through the last century dived under desks in duck-and-cover practices in case of atomic warfare. The difference now is that the danger comes not from a foreign nuclear rival but from within.

Firearms are the leading cause of death in…