The Second Amendment isn’t enough to justify gun violence.

I fell asleep Sunday night in an apartment in Manhattan, where I’ll be staying for a little while this month, and as I drifted off I was composing this column in my head. Salinas Mayor Joe Gunter just last week had uttered the “B” word at a City Council meeting, and there was no way I was going to pass up having some fun with that. The mayor of the largest city in Monterey County mulling over bankruptcy because Salinas’ already astounding Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) debt was about to get much worse? Hell, that column almost writes itself.

When I woke up the next morning, as has been the case through much of the current presidential administration, I braced myself before checking my phone, wondering what Donald had tweeted overnight to further cement his status as the most embarrassing leader on the planet. Instead I turned on my phone and the text messages from California, sent after I’d gone to bed the night before, flooded in.

“I am honestly so sorry about what you have to wake up to,” one of my sons had written. “I wish I knew a way to fix this. I love you so much.” And from my bestie: “WTF is wrong with the world?” And from another friend came the details: “Active shooter at Mandalay Bay and live Periscope from people hiding in the basement. The guy said he heard 20 may be dead, but… ”

But indeed. It may have been 20 when my friend sent the text at 2am, but by the time I woke up and checked the news, the death toll was at 58 with 500 others injured, and both numbers were likely to climb higher. In one fell swoop, some 60-something-year-old white guy bearing no particular ideology, who had nothing in his past to indicate he was capable of it, took aim from his hotel room windows high above an outdoor concert venue packed with 22,000 happy country music fans and opened fire. By the time the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police took down the door of Stephen Paddock’s hotel room on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay, he had killed himself.

Paddock’s brother told a journalist in Florida, where he lives, that had Stephen Paddock killed his own children, he couldn’t be more dumbfounded. Paddock, a retired and seemingly wealthy accountant, was just a guy who lived in Mesquite, Nevada, who liked to eat burritos and drive to Vegas to gamble, the brother, Eric Paddock, told CBS.

“It’s like an asteroid fell out of the sky,” he said.

It’s already been described as the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, and it will remain that way until the next worst mass shooting. Because don’t we all know there’s going to be a next time, and a time after that? We love our guns more than we love children, more than we love human life, and damn anyone who tries to take our weapons away from us.

I write this knowing that even if I mention the concept of gun control, some fringe member of the Second Amendment crew will put my home address online and encourage others to try to harass me. It’s happened every time I write about this.

When I was in Las Vegas last January for my birthday, a friend of ours – a retired military pilot who lives there with his family – invited my husband and me to go shooting with him and a group of his friends. He knew I’d been interested in doing that for awhile, so we piled into his Jeep, met about a dozen of his friends and drove far out into the desert with enough weapons to start and probably finish a war. A patient, kind, mild-mannered real estate investor named Fred took great pains to instruct me on a Glock 9mm, showing me how to handle it safely – how to hold it, load it, chamber a round and where to put my thumb to avoid getting it bit by recoil. He taught me how to stand, how to aim and how to fire.

Here’s the thing: I like the Second Amendment too. And the first, and the fourth and the rest of them. But can anyone rationally explain to me why it should be legal for anyone to own a semi-automatic weapon? Can anyone explain why kits to convert semi-automatic to fully automatic are so readily available? Because “my country, my rights” is no longer good enough.

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com