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ST. LOUIS — “It’s OK to not be OK.�

That was Congresswoman Cori Bush’s message in the moments after the nation’s latest fatal school shooting, this one on the south side of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½.

She spoke those words at the sort of news conference that is all too commonplace in America. A law enforcement official — in this case interim police Commissioner Michael Sack — tells us what we know about the horrific violence that just took place.

Three people are dead and several others injured after a young man with a gun aimed it at students and teachers at the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and started firing.

The city’s leaders, including Bush and Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, gave heartfelt messages about the victims and first responders. And then various politicians and others filled social media feeds with “thoughts and prayers,� frustration over inaction over guns, warnings that it was “too soon� for politics or heartbreaking text messages from their children at the school.

Bush’s message is an important one because the trauma of gun violence is real. And it likely has already affected the lives of some of the young people and adults who ran in fear Monday.

“Everyone who survived here is going to take on trauma,� Sack said.

Indeed, they will. And then, as though their trauma is meaningless to the politicians who rushed out statements, nothing will be done to stop the next school shooting, or theater shooting, or grocery store shooting, or synagogue shooting.

“We are the only country that has this problem,� wrote Michael Bishop on Twitter on Monday after picking up his daughter, a student at CVPA, at the Schnuck’s grocery store down the street.

That’s not OK.

It’s not OK that we know what the problem is — too many guns. And yet Republicans in Congress and the Missouri Legislature regularly stop any meaningful action to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill or, in the case of assault rifles, banning them altogether.

It’s not OK that Republicans like to blame Democratic leaders of cities like ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ for high homicide rates as a political talking point. And yet when those Democratic leaders try to take basic steps to protect their city’s residents from gun violence, Republicans block them from acting.

It’s not OK that after every school shooting — Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ — we write the same narrative, with similar fact patterns, and nothing is ever done.

Well, almost nothing.

After Uvalde, there was the slightest bit of progress, with Congress passing and President Joe Biden signing a gun safety bill that expanded background checks on 18- to-21-year-olds. It also added incentives for states to pass red flag laws and increased federal gun protections for domestic violence victims.

It was a step in the right direction. But here in Missouri, we have a Legislature that passed a law that seeks to exempt the state from federal gun regulations. Jones, who grieved with gun violence victims on Monday, filed a lawsuit in conjunction with ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County Executive Sam Page to overturn that state gun nullification bill. The lawsuit is pending.

It’s not OK that a city full of children who experience gun violence on a regular basis has to turn to the courts to stop lawmakers from passing laws that actually increase the possibility of gun violence in that city.

That’s been the reality in Missouri since the 2007 repeal of a law requiring permits to purchase a handgun. Since then, legislators have regularly weakened gun safety laws. The result has been an increase in gun violence, leading to an additional 50-plus deaths a year in the state, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

The death toll rose by three on Monday, this time at a school, where everybody should feel safe.

“Our children shouldn’t have to experience this,� Jones said on Monday, echoing a message that gets repeated every year, at every school shooting, over and over.

“It’s so unfair,� she said, fighting back tears. “It’s so unfair.�

It’s not OK that this keeps happening. It’s OK to not be OK about that.