esquire.com – WASHINGTON, D.C.—This was not a group you joined, not unless you had paid an incalculable price in blood and grief. On Monday evening, there were mothers and fathers and loved ones of people who were killed in mass shootings gathered in the lobby of the United States Senate just after the United States Senate had disgraced itself, and many of them were holding onto each other and weeping, and there didn’t seem to be any point to wandering into their midst to gather quotes, and the question, “How do you feel about what happened today?” seemed obscenely trivial. So I stood on the fringes and watched these people and, for the first time in a very long time, got genuinely and deeply angry at a political event I was tasked to cover.