Women leave a gathering area for rail yard workers and family members after a gunman killed eight people at a union meeting.Noah Berger/AP

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In a press conference responding to the shooting deaths of eight people in a San Jose rail yard this afternoon, California Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed his weariness at the frequency of mass shootings, asking, “What the hell is going on in the United States of America?”

“There’s a numbness I imagine some of us are feeling about this, because there’s a sameness to this,” he said. “It just feels like this happens over and over and over again. Rise and repeat, rinse and repeat.”

President Biden has ordered the flag to be lowered to half staff for the fifth time since he took office. “There are at least eight families who will never be whole again,” Biden wrote in a statement. “There are children, parents, and spouses who are waiting to hear whether someone they love is ever going to come home. There are union brothers and sisters—good, honest, hardworking people—who are mourning their own.”

The San Jose gunman killed eight people before turning the gun on himself. He set his own house on fire before beginning shooting at a Valley Transportation Authority union meeting, authorities said. They believe there are still explosive devices inside the VTA building.

“What the hell is wrong with us?” Newsom asked, “And when are we going to come to grips with this? When are we going to put down our arms, literally and figuratively?”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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