"I don't know when it became a cliché - I think pretty much anytime after 2013, which is when we tried to get background checks through the Senate," Keenan said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with you," read a banner made by a neighboring Colorado high school. In politics, the phrase dates back at least to President Harry Truman, who said in a 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth, "Our thoughts and prayers are with our young men who are fighting in Korea." As an expression of public grief, specifically following a mass shooting, the phrase dates back at least 22 years to the 1999 Columbine shooting. ![]() It has all of the personalization of a Hallmark card. "Words," Weaver wrote, "do no justice to the tragedy that has unfolded this afternoon."Ī balance of the cerebral (thoughts) and the spiritual (prayers), the phrase, in its original usage, acknowledges human loss, if not action. ![]() In the minutes after the shooting, Weaver, who was at a friend's home at the time, pecked out remarks on his phone. "That particular phrase has become off-limits," Sam Weaver, the Democratic mayor of Boulder, Colorado, said after 10 people, including an on-duty police officer, were murdered at a King Soopers supermarket in March. "As we're seeing more and more shootings, you're seeing just sort of these rote expressions of sympathy without any follow-up," Paul Helmke, the former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who became the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "Even sort of the most reflective way of talking about expressing the sentiment of grief is off the table because it feels hollow, and it now has been hijacked to sound like it's just a fig leaf for action," said Karlin-Neumann, who prepped his candidate to respond to an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart, among other mass shootings that unfolded during Buttigieg's campaign. What's more, he said, the longtime stock greeting-card phrase that once populated public remarks in the wake of tragedies - "thoughts and prayers" - has become verboten. "It does feel like we're starting to run out of words," said Zev Karlin-Neumann, the former chief speechwriter for Pete Buttigieg's 2020 presidential campaign. "As long as nothing's going to change, that's probably true," Keenan said. Their jobs have become tougher as political will in Congress for substantive gun reforms remains ever tenuous. The people who must come up with words when there are no words following each mass shooting in America are increasingly at a loss for what to say. It does feel like we're starting to run out of words. That's according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as "four or more people shot and/or killed in a single incident, at the same general time/location not including the shooter." The Congressional Research Service defines a "mass killing" as "three or more killings in a single incident." This definition was included in the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012, which became law in 2013 after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Nearly 400 times in 2021 alone-including most recently on Tuesday at a high school in Oakland County, Michigan, not far from Detroit, when at least three people were killed-the elected officials and staffers who have become our public grief counselors in this age of mass gun violence have had to draft remarks memorializing the loss of some 15,000 lives. ![]() To make matters bleaker, more than two years earlier, in April 2013, the Manchin-Toomey background-checks proposal - which Obama had spent considerable political capital selling at the beginning of his second term - had died in the Senate by a 54-46 vote. Obama's two terms in office had already been pockmarked by major mass shootings that came to be memorialized by the cities in which they took place: Tucson. "What am I gonna say?" The president wondered aloud in the Oval Office to Cody Keenan, his speechwriter. But Obama, who had built his authorial brand on the back of two hailed political memoirs and often wrote his speeches longhand on yellow legal paper, couldn't find words that met the moment. It was June 2015, and President Barack Obama had been invited to a memorial service for nine Black churchgoers gunned down at a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The wordsmith-in-chief found himself flummoxed. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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