Keith Titus, Bob Case, Roger Phillips — an occasional other — and I meet weekly at Keith’s to formulate solutions to that week’s problems.

But the problems of the current week are commonly the same as the week before, evidencing the recurrence of our solutions’ absence and engendering the frustrations expressed in these written observations.

Keith Titus wrote:

***

“For the past two years, I have pretty much been stuck in bed. So, the wider world comes to me from friends who stop by or the TV. For the past week, the only thing playing on either venue has been the Uvalde shooting. It’s been difficult listening to vignettes over and over again, detailing the number of children killed. Over the years, we have listened to so many stories of mass murders and school shootings that we know what follows next, hundreds of politicians wishing, ‘Thoughts and prayers.’

“What follows thoughts and prayers is earnest-looking Democrats who would get rid of assault rifles tomorrow morning if it weren’t for those equally earnest-looking Republicans claiming that the constitution was built on the premise of a six-shooter on every hip.

“We are no longer amazed by these instances. In fact, this shooting was immediately followed by nine other shootings within the following week, four of which took place in Michigan, the last one near Big Rapids, where a father shot his wife and three children — aged 6, 4, and 3 — before shooting himself. It just gets worse. Signs of Apocalypse.

“They began for me with the Texas Tower shooting on Aug. 1, 1966 (the day before my birthday). That night, Charles Whitman, a Vietnam veteran, stabbed his mother to death, shot his wife, then grabbed a whole pot full of weapons and climbed up into the Texas tower at Texas State University. He killed 14 people and wounded 31 (an impressive total, but hardly a record).

“One of those victims was a teacher at Alpena Community College who was taking a seminar of some sort at the university the same summer I was hired to begin my 30 years of teaching at ACC, from which I had graduated seven years previously. On that date, and every subsequent similar one, we all are left with the same basic question — why?

“There are some terrible instances where you can understand the motivation for the killing. This doesn’t suggest that we can justify them, but we can at least understand what motivated the killer. Shortly after Uvalde, one of the killings was carried out by a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed his doctor because his doctor did not ‘make the pain go away.’ But then he killed three other people who had nothing to do with the pain he was enduring after his surgery.

“Even in that killing, there is the question that so often haunts us — why? Why do they do it if they have no motivation?

“Charles Whitman did not know any of the people that he shot. They were simply 45 people that he caught in the sight of his sniper rifle. In the instance of Uvalde, Sandanista Ramos didn’t hate any of those 10-year-old fifth-graders. Why the slaughter?

“This is so often true with these mass shootings. I am not entirely convinced, despite my leftist credentials, that a world bereft of AK-whatevers would result in fewer mass shootings, just slower. Nor would more mental health dollars. Neither of those abolitions would do away with that fifth W in journalism — the why.

“We’ve rehearsed this more than 200 times this year alone. Good Lord, how many would that be since 1966? So many millions of thoughts and prayers swirling above our heads as we try to pass judgment on law enforcement, on parents, on teachers, on someone. Surely, someone.

“Still no action from the latest umpteenth select group of legislators meeting together. Nothing happening, lots of positioning, an impassioned speech by yet another President who made promises too big, too soon, too late. This is all just too familiar. You can watch their lips move and recite along with them.

“Stop talking.

“Someone needs to scream them quiet, grab them by the scruff of the neck, and take them to the shop of horrors that was once the fifth grade. Bodies shredded by missiles meant for war, not elementary school classrooms. Bodies so badly butchered their parents could not tell one from another. There.

“Now.

“Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.

“Try to make some small movement toward compromise. You may find your soul there.

“Lying next to one of the angels.”

Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs weekly on Saturdays. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.