This is an opinion column.

What’s left to say on a day like today? Our hearts are broken?

Platitudes.

Never again

Lies.

Of course it will happen again. And again. And politicians and cops and columnists and common people will react with all our predictable shock and outrage, just as we’ve done in Birmingham and in California in the last week. We’ll respond with the same indignation and pain we’ve used to talk about the death of 4-year-old Jurnee Coleman, caught in the crossfire of an east Birmingham gunfight Sunday night, and 6-year-old Stephen Romero, gunned down with two others by a mad man at a California garlic festival the same day.

Our hearts are broken.

Never again.

Just like we said last year after 16-year-old Arrielle Lashawn Parker-Jeffries was shot dead in her car in Birmingham.

Senseless, we said. A tragedy we’ll always remember.

Like we said about 16-year-old Nathaniel Holder of Tarrant, and 15-year-old Anesa Baker in Mobile, and of course 17-year-old Courtlin Arrington, who was shot dead because of nothing but someone else’s foolishness in her Birmingham high school.

You forgotten yet?

Everybody has platitudes. Everybody has lies in a land that makes gods of its guns and martyrs of its children. Everybody bites their lips and wails about the tragedy, while politicians dare not run for office in the South without bragging more about the caliber of the weapons they pack than the caliber of their conscience.

We look at the senseless deaths of children and imagine it will spur us to change. Innocents have moved us before, after all. It took four young girls to die in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 before the world would truly acknowledge the depth of the hatred and violence in a city that had seen dozens of bombings in the years leading up to that point.

Young people have changed our world and our way before. The police shooting of 20-year-old Bonita Carter in 1979 was as much a part of Birmingham’s civil rights movement as anything that happened in the 1960s.

Those who despair over the torrent of gun deaths now want to believe these tragedies can lead to change, that they can diminish the romance of the shoot-out culture or show a need for reasonable restrictions on “weapons of goddamn mass destruction,” as California’s governor called the AK-47 knockoff the garlic festival shooter used to kill three people and injure a dozen more.

People in the shadow of that festival want to know why an angry 19-year-old – too young to rent a car – can drive to a neighboring state to legally buy the weapon he brought home to shoot 15 people. People in Birmingham, where the sheer number of falling bullets is an annual New Year’s Eve cause for concern, dismiss real debate by pointing out the man charged with killing little Jurnee did not possess his gun legally. As if that answers everything.

Hell, Alabama is a state where homicide is up 50 percent since 2014, where pot arrests in some recent years outnumbered robbery busts, and where some sheriffs this month were rebuked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for passing out concealed carry permits without bothering to make the required background checks – or worse yet ignoring them.

It is clear now. We love our guns more than we love each other. Right here in the Bible Belt.

Never again, we say? Again?

Did we ever mean it at all?

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.