This is an opinion column

Four young people are dead in Dadeville, 28 others injured at a birthday party that should have been memorable for its joy. It should have been a coming-of-age celebration of a kind that rarely happens after the real world descends.

But our really real world wrecked it all. Again.

Dadeville Police and Alabama Law Enforcement Agency officials are silent. If they know what happened, they aren’t saying. If they know who did it, they aren’t saying. They leave the town and the state and the world to wonder.

I’m going to be frank. I don’t know enough to know what to say. So I will hold most of my words about Dadeville and the response until we find out more.

But I do know Tallapoosa County School Superintendent Raymond Porter was wrong when he said the shooting “does not represent our community. It does not represent our children. And it does not represent who we are.”

Wrong.

Because these shootings have come to represent us all. It’s time to admit it. Like it or not. They are who we have become, a wild west ruled by guns and the gun lobby and fear and vengeance.

Grieve for those young people and their families. Grieve for us all.

Because every time we gasp and act like it’s a rare event, we are wrong.

In January in Huntsville, two women were killed and 13 people injured in a mass shooting at a birthday party.

Last November a man was killed in Birmingham when somebody sprayed bullets outside a child’s birthday party.

A man died and a 6-year-old girl was injured in a May 2018 birthday party shooting in Tuscaloosa. The next month two people were shot at a birthday party in Decatur.

And that’s just in Alabama.

On and on they go, across this nation.

In Tennessee last June an 18-year-old girl was shot in the face after leaving her own birthday party.

In May of 2021 a shooter at a Colorado birthday party killed seven people. A 7-year-old girl was shot at a birthday party in Indiana in 2020. A 23-year-old man was killed at a Pennsylvania birthday party in 2015.

And we hear that it does not represent us. That we are better than that. That it does not represent our communities, and our children, and our nation.

“It does not represent who we are,” that superintendent said.

It’s like blowing out the candles and wishing it were so.

It is not enough. We must own this. We must work to end it.

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