IT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN. The gruesome symbolism of US citizens shot dead and injured amid the red-white-and-blue razzamatazz of Independence Day was horribly predictable.

The law of averages, though it’s more a journalistic construct and far from a proven mathematical rule, has long suggested that sooner rather than later the all-American atrocity of a gunman on a rampage would occur on our national day of celebration.  

Deaths and woundings by gunfire have become so deeply woven into our national life as to be in the minds of too many journalists barely worth covering. Few national news outlets even bothered to report that in the same weekend as the Highland Park killings, there were other shootings in the Chicago metro area that also resulted in death or injury. Just ten hours before the parade shooting, five people were shot at a housing complex in Greater Grand Crossing, on the city’s South Side. On Friday, two people were killed and seven injured in separate shootings in West Garfield Park and the so-called Little Village.

Further afield across the nation as a whole, on the very same day as Highland Park there were also shootings that injured four or more people in Boston, Sacramento, Kansas City, Mo., and Richmond, Va., plus fatal shootings in Denver and in Kenosha, Wis.

We’ve again seen, of course, the formulaic fashion in which the media traditionally treat mass shootings. First, shock and horror followed by outrage and some dutiful honoring of the dead, plus quotations from our most prominent citizens, often offering ‘thoughts and prayers.’ And then comes the political slugging about gun control on the one hand and the Second Amendment on the other. We need to add into the mix, of course, the sporadic and often bitter recriminations over some particulars: who’s at fault? The shooter’s parents? Local security personnel? Mental health services? But the overall frame of the debate is unchanging, reflecting what is an apparently fundamental American dilemma (and one that is incomprehensible to people overseas): an individual’s freedom to carry a deadly weapon versus the public’s right to fredom from injury or death.

The achievement by politicians of both major parties last week, finally passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act aimed at some limiting of gun violence, was hailed in the press as “the most significant gun measure to clear Congress in nearly three decades” (even while it was deliberately designed by its authors to be limited and ‘realistic’). But it’s already been cast entirely into the shade by the enormity of Highland Park. ‘More and stronger’ measures is the demand from those crying out for greater safety.

BUT – AND THERE IS ALWAYS A BUT in this endless argument – the massed ranks of the gun lobby are of course being mobilized. They are always being mobilized. This fact, too, is woven into our political fabric.

A few hours before the July Fourth killings, the National Rifle Association posted a Tweet saying: “We are a country because of brave souls with guns who valued and fought for liberty and freedom.” Voice-over for the accompanying online video intoned: “The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed.” How hollow that rhetoric, as crafted by NRA’s highly paid publicists, now rings after the salvo of shots that echoed from that Highland Park rooftop.

The sharpest response, perhaps, came from Shannon Watts, founder of the Moms Demand Action group, formed in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, and more recently merged with the Everytown for Gun Safety campaign. After recalling what she called the killer’s “sniper position” above the crowd, she said quite simply: “This isn’t freedom; it’s terrorism.”

When it comes to lobbying, it’s a hard call to make on which of the two highly energized sides will prevail in this new round of their dispute. Highland Park might, just might, make the vital difference.

But then, how many times before has that same hope been voiced, after Uvalde, after Buffalo, after El Paso, after Thousand Oaks, after Parkland, after Sandy Hook, after Columbine, after them all?