On October 1, 2015, after a gunman shot and killed his professor and eight students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, President Barack Obama, who three years earlier, following the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, had failed to force Congress to pass new gun safety laws, stood frustrated at the podium. “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it .