Over the course of a 25-year FBI career, my assignments required me to respond to innumerable scenes of unimaginable suffering, at home and abroad. But now, even after my long professional career in government is over, I still struggle to make sense of the senseless violence we see across the country, most recently in Santa Fe, Texas.

In late February 1993 I stood in the lower bowels of the World Trade Center’s North Tower along the jagged crater’s edge — the result of a detonated truck bomb. The pervasive smell of pulverized concrete and explosive residue was still heavy in the acrid air only a day after the attack.

While deployed as a member of an FBI SWAT team, serving as a federal tactical response unit at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, I was part of the unit that arrived at the Centennial Olympic Park bombing site just 20 minutes after Eric Rudolph’s explosives-laden backpack detonated, leaving death and destruction in its wake.

And in the wake of terror attacks on two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August of 1998, I accompanied FBI director Louis Freeh, as part of his protective detail, to inspect the damage wrought from simultaneous truck bomb explosions.

I even stood on the deck of the badly listing USS Cole, the crippled American warship, as a member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, only two days after the devastating al Qaeda attack in Yemen’s Aden harbor in October 2000.

I spent decades responding to the scenes of deadly street gang shootings, Mob rub outs, and secret hideouts where narco-traffickers had tortured and dismembered human beings. Yet the interminable ingestion of shock-the-senses violence couldn’t possibly prepare me for what I witnessed in Lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Something about helplessly witnessing, up close and personal, human beings flinging themselves from 100-story buildings to escape the jet fuel-fed furnace behind them will change a man forever.

The scenes I described above simply cannot be unseen. But they were part and parcel of the profession I willingly joined.

However, having retired from 33 years in government (eight were served in the U.S. military), it seems my past experiences keep returning, packaged ever so slightly differently, but still so relentless in their reappearances.

I don’t respond to crisis incidents anymore to interdict them. I respond to them now as a CNN law enforcement analyst. And though my job now is to talk, to simplify and demystify law enforcement processes and protocols in the wake of criminal or terrorist events, I often find myself struggling to make any sense of the senseless.

And though describing what is going on within law enforcement circles for the viewer is a vastly different tasking than my old job, it still brings me face-to-face with tragedy, misery, and incomprehensible suffering at a relentless pace.

In the past year alone, CNN has dispatched me with their coverage crews to Las Vegas; Parkland, Fla.; and now Santa Fe, Texas; all sites of recent mass shootings.

And on Halloween last year, when yet another madman plunged a truck into bicyclists and runners alongside the West Side Highway, I spend two more days providing analysis from location.

The images don’t become any easier to take in. The necessary stout constitution that a career in law enforcement demands doesn’t really help with the resultant nightmares. It does help me to better manage the sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

It numbs me. To a degree.

But now when taking in these front-row scenes of unimaginable suffering, the pressure to interdict those with evil designs, or to help make the case to convict them, is absent.

There’s more time to reflect and to place things in context. To contemplate the “why,” as opposed to simply assessing the “how.”

Five days on the ground in Las Vegas last October gave me ample time to question why an aftermarket device, the bump stock , was legally available for purchase, when the gimmick’s sole purpose is to convert a legal semi-automatic rifle into an illegal weapon capable of automatic fire.

In Parkland, I was horrified to learn that the FBI had made a blunder of colossal proportions in missing an actionable lead phoned in to their tip line. And then the revelation that an armed deputy sheriff, assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as an SRO, cowardly shirked his responsibility to enter the building and confront a gunman who was slaughtering innocents. No evidence of fealty to his mission to “protect and serve.”

And while officials in Santa Fe have been stingy with the release of details, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, advised that the suspect in the shooting was in possession of a sawed-off shotgun when he stole 10 innocent lives.

Having carried a Remington 870 shotgun while in the FBI, I was familiar with the parameters surrounding how alterations to the weapon (i.e. shortening the barrel length) could render the same gun illegal.

So, to be precise in my commentary, I set about to research firearms laws relative to the National Firearms Act . I was exceedingly surprised to learn that there are workarounds to the law that prohibit citizens from possessing a shotgun with a barrel length less than 18 inches, or an overall gun length of less than 26 inches.

As long as you register the weapon as an “Any Other Weapon (AOW),” then you have an NFA catch-all that allows a shotgun barrel to be shortened to 14 or 12 inches, as long as the stock is replaced with a pistol grip.

Ergo, while not technically meeting the definition of a “shotgun” by NFA standards, and not technically “sawed-off,” you have an easily portable, concealable, and powerful weapon that circumvents the spirit of the law. Keep in mind, you simply have to refer to it now as a “smooth bore pistol.”

Maddening.

And so, as we reflexively retreat to opposite corners of the gun reform debate in the wake of yet another tragedy, let’s actually ponder how many “missed leads/signs” (Parkland), “glitches in system databases” (Sutherland Springs), “legal workarounds” (Vegas and possibly Santa Fe), and let’s commit to fix this uniquely American problem of mass slaughters.

The responses to these crisis events may be palpably different on the ground — visceral anger at the NRA and GOP in Parkland, versus stoicism and resolute resistance to an evil madman possibly causing Second Amendment infringements in Texas — but can’t we all agree there’s low-hanging fruit here to address?

Attacking the other side isn’t a solution to addressing the issue of protecting our citizenry.

We must resist the urges of intransigence and help move the debate from one where we can’t even settle on the metrics to define mass shootings, or even count school shootings, into one of bipartisan collegiality and effective legislative action.

If there was only a way to share with lawmakers the horrific images that often plague my thoughts and torture my dreams.

Trust me. That would be more than enough to move them to action.

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University.