Trade masks for body armor? First news out of California this morning was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake rumbling off the coast about 10 miles south of Malibu Beach: The fire department “completed a strategic 470 square-mile survey of the City of Los Angeles following the 4.2M earthquake near Malibu. No damage or injuries were reported and normal operational mode has resumed,” it said. Relax, Southern California. Just another earthquake. Not another mass shooting. The latter will be along presently. You know, “normal operational mode.” CNN reported on the epidemic mass shootings already this year: The scenes of agony and horror are increasingly all too familiar in America. In fact, 39 mass shootings have taken place across the country in just the first three weeks of 2023, per the Gun Violence Archive. Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling while others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards. “A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop.” But how that happens with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen. As you can see from the graphic above, the reporting cannot keep up with the body count. When people three years ago started dying of COVID-19 so fast that bodies had to be buried…