Will Bunch writes a brilliant dissection of Saturday’s security breach at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for The Philadelphia Inquirer (gift link):

Right outside the ballroom at the Washington Hilton, the gunfire was still echoing, a Secret Service agent whose bulletproof vest apparently deflected a bullet was speeding to the hospital, and the stripped-naked alleged shooter, a 31-year-old Californian, was pressed facedown into a plush carpet. Yet inside, the first instinct of the president and the media superstars of an America comfortably numb to gun violence was to party on.

“Please take your seat,” a disembodied voice announced over the ballroom loudspeaker. “Dinner service will resume momentarily” — even as some trays had toppled over from waitstaff who’d been ducking and covering moments earlier. Trump agreed, as the former TV reality-show star posted that he wanted to “LET THE SHOW GO ON.”

Avert your eyes?

It’s not lost on me that this latest apparent presidential assassination attempt came the same day that I linked to MAGA supporters embracing Trump assassination conspiracies. We have become so inured to mass shootings and political assassinations that the first reaction of many was to decry the entire incident as “staged.” The muted reaction by the press and the president—including the president’s immediate call to build his ballroom, rather than, say, for better gun control—certainly did nothing to lend an air of urgency or danger.

We are so lost as a country.