After El Paso and Dayton, Three Ways to Think About Mass Shootings

“The worst is not,” Edgar says in “King Lear,” amid much—an old man’s madness, a father’s brutal blinding—that would seem about as bad as life can get, “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” The true worst, his point is, will be so annihilating that we will not even have language left to reference it. But, if finding words for the worst is not within our power, finding them for what’s about as bad as bad can be is—and that is the case with the two...