This is an opinion column.

It hurts to see the news sometimes.

Two Huntsville Police officers were shot yesterday, apparently trying to save a woman from a violent man. Officer Garrett Crumby is dead. Officer Albert Morin is fighting for his life.

We can only imagine the knocks on the doors of their families, the hard news and well-meaning words that will do no good. The worst fears, realized.

Words are hard right now, because solutions are harder.

The death of Crumby, the wounds to Morin, bring home what a hard, dangerous, often thankless job these men and women have. They rush to a scene, never knowing exactly what they will find. Some days, it hurts to see and to say, they do not get to rush home.

It is heartbreaking.

Police officers are rightly praised when things go right, as in Nashville this week, when they entered Covenant School and reached a killer 14 minutes after receiving the 911 call.

They are rightly criticized, as in Uvalde, Texas, last year, when police loitered outside, waiting for more than an hour to confront a man who shot 38 people, killing 21 of them.

It is a hard job, with every moment under scrutiny. Any decision might change the course of a life.

We send out thoughts and prayers, and it is never enough.

Words lose their meaning. Answers don’t come, and political division prevents genuine discussion about guns or culture or what America is cracked up to be in the first place. People’s lives become political pawns before their bodies are laid to rest.

I don’t want that. But I don’t have good words. Not now.

America is still reeling from the Covenant School shooting that killed three nine-year-olds and three teachers. Not because it is unique, or the first, or even rare. There have been 376 school shootings since Columbine, according to the Washington Post’s school shooting database. But the images of elementary school students fleeing a private church school resonated.

Yet the country has, it often seems, grown numb to violence that occurs like clockwork.

In Birmingham, nine people have been killed in as many days, and each of the stories should resonate as well.

This morning in west Birmingham a young woman – as yet unidentified but described as a teenaged girl, was shot dead in a car, another teen girl wounded in a car down the street.

On Sunday a former UAB football player was shot dead, apparently ambushed while pumping gas at a crowded filling station on Tallapoosa Street, between the airport and downtown Birmingham. As Carol Robinson reported, 25-year-old Demetrius Antwan Davis Jr. died as his father had: shot to death at a gas station.

I wish I had words. I wish I had answers. I don’t. I wish we could talk about it without the baggage of our politics and our world views. But we can’t. Or we won’t.

The truth is we build a nation where opportunity is not equally shared, where punishment is not equally meted out, where violence is worshiped, firepower is considered strength, and forgiveness confused for weakness. We flood the market and the streets with killing machines, and the magazines to fill them, and tell our police officers to run toward the danger.

We somehow gloss over the fact that 105 police officers – 107 after the Huntsville shootings – have been killed or wounded by gunfire this year alone. It’s a dangerous job in a dangerous world.

So far this year almost 1,200 teenagers have been killed or injured by guns, according to the Gun Violence Archive. So far this year 61 children under the age of 11 have been killed by firearms in America. Another 132 were wounded.

We can argue over banning assault weapons, or high-caliber rifles, or high-capacity magazines, But states like Alabama look at those numbers as a reason to make guns easier to carry, rather than harder.

Juan Robert Laws, the 24-year-old with a history of arrests for violence, was charged with capital murder Tuesday. Last week he pleaded guilty to a 2022 charge of carrying a pistol without a license. Today, thanks to the Alabama Legislature, that would not be a crime.

Our thoughts and prayers mean little, as these deaths mount. They are merely words we use when we have no solution, no resolve, nothing to say that means anything.

I feel that right now. And that helplessness. When thoughts and prayers are all I have to give.

I wish that were enough.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.