Editorial: We must find power in our outrage and sorrow to act

Let's get the necessaries out of the way first.

• Whatever his political or social affiliations turn out to be, the Las Vegas shooter was a minuscule blip in the population of people holding similar views. People on all sides of every political question abhor such acts, and no reasonable person condones them.

• The Las Vegas shooter should never have been able to acquire even one of the weapons in the shocking arsenal he managed to amass in the 32nd-floor hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

• The Las Vegas shooter was a [insert your preferred derogatory insult here].

• Our hearts break for the innocent victims of this horrible act, the literally thousands directly affected who have lost sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, mothers, fathers, friends.

• The heroes of the moment, as always in these circumstances, were the scores of first responders racing into the terrible unknown.

• We are running out of words to express outrage and sorrow after such incidents.

All of the above is true. You can get your fill of similar observations on Facebook and Twitter, expressed in every conceivable tone of voice. And yet, we long for something more ... more ... more ... well, maybe just more. In the light of the day following that awful night, we have these haunting images:

One is of the shooter's brother standing before television news crews in the driveway of his Orlando, Florida, home. It is not enough that the man has lost a brother. He clearly cannot cope with the enormity of the "asteroid," to use his word, that struck his family. His struggle for meaning, for understanding, for context, reflects our own.

"When you guys find out why this happened, let us know," he says, fighting back tears. "I have no idea whatsoever. We're lost. I don't understand. It makes - There's no - anything. He's a guy. He's just a guy, who lived in Las Vegas and played at the casinos, went on cruises, did stuff. There's no. There's nothing. That's what's bizarre. He lived in a house. He had a girlfriend. There's nothing. ... If there was anything I could've done, I would have done it, but there was exactly nothing."

Exactly nothing. A phrase suggesting a feeling of helplessness that it's hard not to share - but must be resisted. That feeling finds its way into a bitter reflection on the satire website The Onion: "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens."

"In the hours following a violent rampage in Las Vegas in which a lone attacker killed more than 50 individuals and seriously injured 400 others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Monday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place," The Onion's commentary begins.

The phrase echoes: "Exactly nothing."

Finally, our minds are both tortured and consoled with the videos showing the thousands of concert goers, of all ages, genders and backgrounds, simultaneously scrambling for safety and rushing to the aid and protection of people around them. "Exactly nothing" may have gotten us here, but it is not who we are in times of crisis. We are in these times exactly something. Who can say exactly what? But it is something that has power. It is something in ourselves we must still call upon to counteract this unrelenting onslaught of senselessness. And if we refuse to surrender our resolve and our perspective and, yes, all these painful images, we will find in that power a solution.

To be sure, that solution will involve a host of approaches we've yet found the will or the skill to manage - guns, security measures, mental health, outreach, supportive relationships, civility and more. But because at our core we care about each other, about our society and about our country, we will eventually manage them if we refuse to give up, refuse to succumb to "exactly nothing."

We are, as we said, all of us, running out of words to express outrage and sorrow after such horrors. May we, all of us, never run out of the outrage and sorrow that will lead us to stop them.