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United and Delta join growing list of companies that will no longer offer discounts to NRA members.

Lash to McGentrix: Why don’t you state and defend your opinion?

The United States is in the midst of at least two plagues with much in common.

One is gun-fueled mass murder; the other is addiction to opioids — pain pills, heroin, fentanyl.

Both are uniquely American afflictions, killing in alarming numbers. Both are revved in part by commercial interests and in part by the collapse of community in American culture. Both persist because of the erroneous belief that there’s an easy answer to these complicated problems.

Above all, both are about supply.

Laid on top of a culture of increasing social isolation for many, our vast supply of easily accessible opioids has sent overdose deaths skyrocketing. So, too, a vast supply of easily accessible guns has produced a similarly rising death toll.

I wrote a book about our opioid-addiction epidemic. I first thought the book was about drug marketing — both from pharmaceutical companies and from Mexican heroin traffickers. But it was bigger than that; it was about who we were as Americans. The root of the scourge, I believe, is in isolation and a conviction that we are entitled to a life free of pain — all of which forms heroin’s natural habitat.

We exalted the private, the individual, at the expense of community. We once played kick the can in the streets until late on summer evenings. Now those streets are empty as we huddle at home. More than 12 percent of the population served in the military during World War II, and nearly every American sacrificed to beat the Nazis. Today, less than 1 percent join the armed services. Kids are dosed with weeks’ worth of narcotics to keep them from the three days of pain that accompany a wisdom-tooth extraction. We’ve seen parents prosecuted for letting their kids go to the park alone. College students wilt when exposed to ideas they disagree with, and 24-hour cable news shrieks at us, forcing us into ideological bubbles.

All of this has provided fertile soil for a two-decade dosing with opioids — promoted by drug companies, prescribed by doctors, demanded by many of us — that led a national explosion of addiction and death.

I was a newspaper reporter for almost 30 years before writing that book. I covered seven mass murders — six involving guns. I was in Tucson after Jared Loughner shot 19 people, six of whom died, including a federal judge; among the wounded was Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the House of Representatives at the time. Over the phone, I covered the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Long before all that, I covered perhaps the first school shooting of our era of gun massacres — in Stockton, Calif., in 1989. I was the crime reporter for The Stockton Record when a loner with an AK-47 opened fire on a playground full of children at recess at Cleveland Elementary School. Five of them died; some 30 others were wounded.

My job was to find out as much about each assailant as possible. As years passed, I realized I was telling the same story over and over — a lost, isolated, unbalanced (usually white) young man with legal access to firearms.

Now, Nikolas Cruz, who has been charged with the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, has taken his place among those lost boys, all products of our searing American isolation and ready supply of guns.

I learned writing my book that when you unleash a vast new supply of potent legal drugs on a population as bereft of community as ours, the consequences are painful, enduring and nationwide. Enormous supply creates enormous abuse.

That’s the lesson we should take from our gun scourge as well.

It’s not just that each gunman procured these weapons legally, but that our supply is so immense that finding a gun — legally or not — is easy. Mass shootings plague us, but so does a decades-old torment of gun violence and suicide.

Most gun owners are law abiding, just as many people have no trouble taking narcotic painkillers according to the prescribed instructions. Yet when guns, or opioids, are accessible in plentiful supply to everyone, without much monitoring of consumers’ backgrounds, and are then mixed with the isolation and disconnection in American culture today, havoc results.

The end to our opioid addiction epidemic, I believe, will come from a symphony of small solutions, many of them unsexy: expanding treatment options, using jails as recovery centers, creating syringe exchanges, broadening the use of Narcan and widening the curriculums in medical schools to include pain and addiction studies. Law enforcement’s role is crucial. Recovering addicts need supply reduced. The supply of opioids on our streets is so vast and potent that when a recovering addict relapses, the result is often death. Insurance companies, meanwhile, need to reimburse for non-opioid pain treatment, as they once did. Up to now, we’ve lowered pain pill prescribing but without raising the numbers of pain strategies available for chronic-pain patients, and for which doctors are trained. Those patients thus turn to the black market for pills, but also for heroin and fentanyl, the supply of which is booming.

All this, in other words, is a community approach to a plague feeding on our isolation.

Mass murder calls for the same.

Restoring the ban on assault rifles is essential, as is banning gun ownership among people convicted of domestic abuse, those with domestic abuse restraining orders, and the mentally ill. So is banning gun possession among those repeatedly convicted of driving while intoxicated. We need to change the law to let the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study gun violence as a public health issue. We need longer prison terms for stealing a gun or possessing one that’s stolen; possessing a stolen gun has very different potential consequences from possessing a stolen X-Box.

The problem is, both the opioid epidemic and mass murder are bedeviled by our isolation. Some treatment advocates, stung by the war on drugs, won’t recognize law enforcement’s necessary role in our attack on addiction as a robust player in a multipronged approach. The Republican Party — which understands that an enormous opioid supply fuels our addiction scourge — fails, or doesn’t want, to understand that the supply of firearms is at the root of our problem of mass shootings. Moreover, the party’s response to each horror, apart from the by-now rote “thoughts and prayers,” has been the claim that this or that proposed reform wouldn’t have stopped the shooter. If one grand and easy answer wouldn’t have saved the day then we’re narcotized to inaction.

To get beyond all that, we must again act as bold, resilient Americans, tackling a problem with a can-do attitude. We must stop believing in one easy answer to complicated problems, and shamefully giving up when one doesn’t magically appear.

Those attitudes are just more symptoms of our culture of isolation, in which we’ve lost the habit of collaborating with our neighbors. And that, in turn, is the natural habitat not just of heroin but of that next young killer now planning to roam a school corridor.

Not when the Democrats say that inability to balance a checkbook, wearing glasses, having blue eyes, working for the post office, and being a war veteran are all evidence of mental illness.

Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference this morning, where he declared that Donald Trump’s election is proof that God exists.

Declaring that conservatives and Republicans must mobilize to vote in the 2018 midterm elections in order to prevent Democrats from gaining control of Congress, Gorka said that if Hillary Clinton had become become president in 2016, “we would have lost our republic.”

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Not when the Democrats say that inability to balance a checkbook, wearing glasses, having blue eyes, working for the post office, and being a war veteran are all evidence of mental illness.

Citation?