Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun/Reuters

Las Vegas Metro Police and medical workers stage in the intersection of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South after a mass shooting at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1.

In one of his songs, the country music star Jason Aldean sings, “this might be the heartache that don’t stop hurting.”

That lyric has new resonance today. Sunday night Mr. Aldean was playing to thousands of fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas strip when a sniper opened fire from the 32^nd floor of a nearby hotel. In a matter of seconds a joyous gathering of music lovers was transformed into one of the worst tragedies in American history.

Modern mass shootings target places where people gather to connect – concerts, colleges, nightclubs, theaters, schools. They attack both individuals and different versions of community.

Now another American family struggles to recover following apparently senseless gun violence. Country music has long reflected themes of hurt, loss, and recovery. Perhaps that heritage will give fans comfort in the days ahead.

“Here’s the most wonderful gift, that of music and coming together peacefully, and it becomes a venue for the worst of us – it’s a shame,” says Ron Pen, a retired musicologist at the University of Kentucky.

Details about the attack remained sketchy on Monday. Law enforcement officials identified the suspected gunman as Stephen Paddock, a resident of a Mesquite, Nev., retirement community.

At least 58 people died in the tragedy, according to a police briefing. Hundreds more were injured.

Mr. Paddock had no military background or obvious political animosity, according to media reports based on interviews with family members. A brother said he was dumbfounded by the tragedy and that Paddock was simply a man who lived in rural Nevada and liked to drive to Las Vegas to gamble.

There seemed no obvious reason Paddock should target the music festival – though further information may yet emerge.

It is “hard to conceive of country music as the common denominator ... providing a motive for killing,” says Mr. Pen of the University of Kentucky.

Witnesses described a terrible scene of bursts of rapid gunfire, interrupted by silence, presumably as the gunman reloaded. From his high perch the assailant had an easy view and a packed field to aim at.

Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal/AP

People wait as the Tropicana Las Vegas goes on lockdown during an active shooter situation on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1.

The speed of fire was such that some experts wondered whether the gunman was using a fully automatic, machine gun-like weapon. Such guns are largely illegal in the United States (those produced before 1986 can still be bought and sold, but they are quite expensive).

Gun control advocates said the tragedy was further proof that the US needs more curbs on military-style assault weapons – semi-automatics whose trigger must be pulled for each shot – and high-capacity magazines.

One musician at the festival spoke out about the need for such measures after witnessing the events of Sunday night.

“I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was. We actually have members of our crew with [concealed carry licenses], and legal firearms on the bus,” Caleb Keeter, lead guitarist of the Josh Abbott band, wrote in a long Twitter post. “They were useless. We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us.” One person, he continued, “laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power.”

Past tragedies, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012, did not result in passage of gun control legislation. Currently the highest-profile gun measure moving through Congress is one that would loosen, not tighten, firearms regulation by making it easier to purchase gun silencers.

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot at a 2011 constituent meeting in Tucson, on Monday held a news conference outdoors in the shadow of the US Capitol.

“The nation’s counting on you,” she said, haltingly, as she turned to point at the building behind her.

Those opposed to new gun curbs, a political group that includes many Republicans, say that mental illness and other behavioral issues are a key cause of the tragedies. Many gun measures would not really stop those attacks, they say. The Second Amendment to the Constitution guards American access to firearms in general.

President Trump, for his part, called the Sunday night Las Vegas shooting an “act of pure evil.”

Mr. Trump said, “We pray for the day when evil is banished, and the innocent are safe from hatred and fear.”

John Locher/AP

Police run to cover at the scene of a shooting near the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1 in Las Vegas. Hundreds of victims were transported to hospitals after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival.

To some extent country music today symbolizes rural Red State America – the heartland of Trump’s political supporters. But the art form itself is rooted in the experience of an agricultural and working class past that was Democratic long before it was Republican. It is bonded together by the power of narrative and melody to frame the daily rhythms of harvests and heartbreaks.

There are 95 million country music fans in the US, according to the Country Music Association. Half make more than $100,000 a year. One in three has a white-collar job. Family is at the heart of the genre – 81 percent have dinner with their family every night, as opposed to 43 percent of the general US population, according to the Country Music Association.

Unlike some other genres, the country music audience is getting younger, on average. Its fastest growth has been on the East and West coasts.

Mr. Aldean, the singer on stage when the shots rang out, has dozens of top ten hits, including “Big Green Tractor,” “She’s Country,” and “Dirt Road Anthem.”

Country songs have always “told stories of love and treachery,” says Pen. “It’s always been a narrative cleanly told, a story told in song, and that has been country music’s virtue – a directness of expression, in a language that just about anybody in America can get.”

Country music’s power to relieve heartache may be tested in the following days as Las Vegas – and America – tries to recover and understand forces that can turn innocence into tragedy in a literal muzzle flash, raising new concerns about security in public places.

Dozens of performers and other music industry figures, from now-pop-star-once-country-queen Taylor Swift to Ariana Grande, whose own concert was targeted by terrorists in Manchester, England, earlier this year, tweeted and Instagrammed out their shock and support.

“Music is something that brings people together and speaks to their hearts, and to think that this group of music lovers was targeted ... it just makes you sick to your stomach,” says Beverly Keel, the chair of Middle Tennessee State University’s Department of Recording Industry.

Country musician Bobbie Malone, who performs with her husband Bill Malone, author of an authoritative history of country music, says the shooting is an American tragedy in every way. They were regular folks having a good time, she says.

“Someone is bound to write [a song] about this, and I don’t think we have to wait long and see,” she says.

Mrs. Malone adds that it will be a complicated subject to tackle. “It is domestic terror – here is the most American of music, and it’s not some Islamic fundamentalist” attacking its fans.

Amul Thapar’s first opinion as a federal circuit court judge didn’t exactly make headlines when it was published in August.

An Ohio man sued an online retailer, claiming he’d been misled over the $27 price of portable speakers. Writing for a unanimous panel of three judges on the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Thapar disagreed, siding with the retailer.

Nonetheless, the long-term implications of Thapar’s ascension to the Sixth Circuit could be significant. He is the first of potentially hundreds of conservative judges President Trump is expected to place in lifetime appointments on federal courts. Eight months into a presidency so far short on legislative victories, it is the profile of nominees the president is nominating, and the pace with which the Republican-controlled Senate is confirming them, that has conservatives cheering the loudest.

“I’ve generally not been at all shy of being critical of this administration,” says Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, “but when you look at this, they are steaming ahead with putting forward slates of highly-qualified nominees on a regular basis.”

Mr. Trump has nominated 58 people for federal judgeships, and, as of Sept. 28, the Senate had confirmed seven of them, far outpacing his immediate predecessors. While some of the nominees have raised concerns because of past controversies – including one who described transgender children as part of “Satan’s plan,” and another who called Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute” – what is winning Trump plaudits on the right is their conservative credentials. Specifically, an adherence to originalism, a largely conservative philosophy defined by interpreting the US Constitution as the Framers would have intended.

In other words, they all fit the mold of Neil Gorsuch, a committed originalist, whose confirmation to the Supreme Court in April is arguably Trump’s greatest achievement to date. Indeed, the “Trump effect” on American law will begin to be felt in earnest during the high court’s term that begins Monday. With Justice Gorsuch, a 5-to-4 conservative majority has been restored on the court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and this term is likely to deliver conservatives some big wins on issues from religious freedom and partisan gerrymandering to public sector unions and the travel ban.

When describing the new term, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted it would be “monumental.”

The most federal appointments in 40 years

But with his lower court appointments, legal scholars say, Trump has the ability to shape American jurisprudence in an even broader and more durable way.

Thanks in part to obstruction by Senate Republicans – in addition to Merrick Garland, former-President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Justice Scalia, Senate Republicans also blocked a host of lower court nominees, including the Sixth Circuit seat Thapar now occupies – Mr. Trump entered office with twice as many judicial vacancies as Obama. Combining those with older judges who could accept “senior status,” a kind of semi-retirement, Trump could appoint more federal judges than any president in the past four decades.

While these appointments may not attract as much attention as a Supreme Court pick, they are arguably more important, experts say: Collectively, they hear tens of thousands of cases each year, while the Supreme Court hears less than a hundred.

“Relatively few of their decisions are reviewed on appeal. For most litigants in the federal system the federal trial judge is the judge,” says Judith Resnik, a professor at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn. “Their powers are enormous.”

Federal trial judges, she adds, “make findings of fact and conclusions of law, they control the timing and the pace of litigation, and their wisdom and their kindness are essential to the well-functioning judiciary.”

Only one of 11 federal appeals courts had a Democratic majority when Mr. Obama entered office; and when he left nine of them did. One of those courts, the Fourth Circuit, made a decisive ruling against Trump's travel ban earlier this year.

The lower federal courts, particularly appeals courts, are also an increasingly popular pool from which to draw Supreme Court nominees. For decades, conservative groups such as the Federalist Society have been building up a network of legal scholars and jurists committed to originalism. With a membership upward of 70,000 attorneys and law students, the organization gained a reputation as a “conservative pipeline” to the high court. 

Many of Trump’s judicial nominees so far are Federalist Society members. Several others – including Thapar – were included in the list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees he released during the campaign. The campaign drew up the list last year with heavy consultation from conservative groups the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

Conservatives are more enthused by Trump’s judicial nominations than other recent Republican presidents in large part because of the endorsement from groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society, who have been frustrated by Republican judicial appointments drifting to the ideological center and left during their careers.

The nominees so far “are all highly qualified, highly credentialed ... committed conservatives,” says Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

“It’s always hard to tell what a nominee’s going to be like once they’re confirmed,” she adds. “But I can tell you from the nominees President Trump has made so far that many of them are cut from the same cloth as Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia.”

Unlike the George W. Bush administration, the Trump administration seems to be looking to nominate not just conservatives, but originalists specifically, says Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“They don’t want to just avoid [nominees] moving to the left in office, but also want to avoid the John Roberts scenario, who was a loyal Republican and served the administration, but who is perhaps too judicially restrained,” he adds. “There’s definitely been an effort to identify people who are seriously committed to doctrines and modes of analysis rather than just being seen as conservatives or Republicans.”

Too extreme for the bench?

In the eyes of critics, however, many of Trump’s nominees are too extreme to be worthy of confirmation. In particular liberal groups and Senate Democrats have locked onto controversial statements some nominees have made as reasons to block their confirmation.

• Damien Schiff, a lawyer with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation nominated for a seat on the US Court of Federal Claims, described Justice Kennedy in a 2007 blog post as a “judicial prostitute,” and also wrote that he disagrees with a landmark ruling that decriminalized sodomy;
• Jeff Mateer, a top lawyer in the Texas attorney general’s office and nominated to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, once described transgender children as part of “Satan’s plan”;
• John Bush, a Kentucky lawyer confirmed to the Sixth Circuit in July, wrote controversial posts on an anonymous blog that disparaged gay rights and compared the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion to the Dred Scott decision that affirmed the right to own slaves;
• Amy Coney Barrett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School and a nominee for the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, has been scrutinized by The New York Times for being a member of the oath-bound religious group People of Praise.

“There’s thousands of eminently qualified Republican lawyers who would be outstanding judges. That’s not who this president is nominating,” says Dan Goldberg, legal director of the liberal Alliance for Justice. “Instead he seems to be seeking out the most extreme, most polarizing, most ideologically conservative jurists possible.”

“Whether our civil rights laws are properly enforced, worker protection [laws], protections for the environment, protections for consumers, protections for investors,” he adds, “much of this will be decided by the lower court judges the president is putting in place.”

The Federal Claims court for example is the court that heard challenges to the “don’t ask don’t tell” ban on homosexual service members. It would also likely be the court where challenges to a transgender military ban would play out, experts say.

How much weight to private statements?

When it comes to the judicial confirmation process, some experts say, a nominee’s private statements should not be given much, if any, weight compared to their qualifications and legal writing – particularly in the social media age.

“It would be sad for the country if any lawyer or private attorney or legal academic engaged in Twitter or social media were disqualified from the bench from any intemperate remark they made. I think that would cover a wide swath of people across the ideological spectrum,” says Professor Adler. “The question is what conduct can we expect as a judge.”

Other legal experts disagree, however.

“Qualifications include views, and views include what people have written, whether it’s in published articles or blog posts,” says Professor Resnik. “Federal judges are called upon all the time to make rapid-order decisions. What they say quickly as well as what they say slowly counts.” 

Furthermore, while there are a large number of vacancies in the federal court system, caseloads as a whole have also been gradually declining for a decade. So while there should be an urgency to fill vacancies in the busiest courts, Resnik says, that shouldn’t be the case for every vacancy.

“We’re looking for patience, for kindness, for thoughtfulness, for wisdom, for generosity of spirit, and for understanding the conflicting needs of the different kinds of litigants that come before the court,” she continues. “A [vacancy] crisis shouldn’t be the justification for giving anyone life tenure who doesn’t have the qualities of fair-mindedness and open-mindedness that are requisite for being a good judge.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the designation of People of Praise, due to an editing error.

Nacho Doce/Reuters

A girl plays with her dogs in front of a collapsed building on Sept. 28 after an earthquake in Mexico City.

The 9- and 10-year-olds, all wearing matching sweater vests and cardigans, are sitting in a semicircle inside the A Favor del Niño primary school, talking. The subject is bravery.

“A lot has changed in our personal lives, and if you want to cry, that doesn’t make you any less brave,” their instructor tells them on a recent Thursday morning. “Even adults have been crying over this.” 

Ten days prior, a 7.1 earthquake rocked Mexico, leveling some 40 buildings here in the capital, including one primary school, and killing more than 330 people nationwide. Most of the city’s roughly 9,000 public and private schools remain closed, and officials say it could take up to two weeks before they’re given the all clear.  

Many students – and parents – are eager for schools to reopen. But there’s a catch: The quake hit at 1:14 p.m. on a Tuesday, while kids were in class. So while reopening schools represents a welcome return to routine, it also means a return to ground zero. In response, educators, principals, parents, and NGOs across Mexico City are exchanging materials on how to talk about the quake with their children, how to assuage fears – and how to get back to work.

Nacho Doce/Reuters

Jesus Roldan, 6, offers a plate of food to a police officer on Sept. 29 next to a collapsed building in the Condesa neighborhood after an earthquake in Mexico City.

“We knew that once kids returned [to school], their last memory here would be the quake,” says Noe Gonzalez, the co-director of A Favor del Niño primary school. Some 146 students evacuated from the 1940s-era building into a small concrete plaza on Sept. 19, then out a gate and up a hill to street level, trying to keep their balance as the ground undulated beneath their tiny feet.

“It’s important to close that emotional loop,” Mr. Gonzalez says of revisiting the quake on the first day back to school.

Restoring a sense of safety

Therapists' tents that have popped up in parks and at the sites where buildings collapsed speak to one way people are trying to do that, with counselors and psychologists essentially putting out their shingle and offering free services.

Ana Luisa, a domestic worker, watches her 6-year-old daughter Ana Maria coloring on large sheets of paper beside a therapist tent in Parque España, on a recent afternoon. She asked not to use her full name because she uses her employer’s address to enroll Ana Maria in a better public primary school. She ran to the school the moment the earth stopped shaking on the 19th and found her safe, but the days that followed have been tough.

“She won’t go to the bathroom by herself, she won’t go into any room by herself,” she says two days after the quake. Ana Luisa messaged her daughter’s teacher on Facebook for advice. “She told me to keep the news off when Ana Maria’s in the room and to avoid streets where buildings fell,” she says.

“Sometimes I worry the quake broke my daughter, too,” she says, wiping her forearm across her teary eyes. 

Still, says Dora Giusti, the chief of protection with UNICEF in Mexico, children are particularly resilient and adults can help children tap that inherent capacity for recovery when processing the events of that day. The organization has been working with teachers in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, where an 8.1 quake hit Sept. 7, to prepare them for the return of students. They’re also sharing materials on social media and with the government to help teachers and kids to deal with the disaster.

Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

Toy animals stand on a window sill in a classroom on Sept. 21 as rescue workers participate in a search for students at the Enrique Rebsamen school after an earthquake in Mexico City.

A key activity UNICEF encourages is helping kids design a plan for future earthquakes. “It helps them feel cared for, safe, and prepared,” Ms. Giusti says. 

At Al Favor del Niño, the courtyard is filled with laughter and happy screams during recess on the first day back. Kids kick rubber balls, gather around board games, and a few are busy tying their sweaters together in what appears to be an elaborate game of make-believe. 

“I’m so happy to be back,” says 10-year-old Carolina Garcia Guerrero. “I think that, even though my house isn’t in a bad state, I feel safer here at school,” she says. It’s “because my friends are here.”

The quake hit on the 32nd anniversary of Mexico’s 1985 temblor, which left thousands dead and flattened hundreds of buildings. “In some ways, it was a good day for an earthquake,” says Susana Vargas, a fifth-grade teacher. The entire school went through an earthquake drill earlier that morning.

“Yes, there were some students crying and panicking, but I was so proud to see that they knew exactly what to do,” she says, describing how they had their hands on their heads, protecting their necks, and were calm as they marched up the hill to their final evacuation point. 

Before reopening the school, the staff here came together to talk about their own experiences with the quake. “Some teachers cried, they expressed their fears. Then we started sharing material,” says Gonzalez, one of the school’s co-directors. 

That included a book, adapted from Chile, where quakes are also a regular occurrence. Some classrooms showed videos about the science behind temblors and Mexico’s susceptibility to them. The fifth-graders listened to a song about disasters and hope, and picked out their favorite lines to share with the group.

“And you will see how this world changes, when without fear you open your door at last, and keep your light on, however small,” one popular lyric read. 

A group of third-graders gathered after recess to receive letters of support and encouragement sent by children from across South America, also part of the Teach for All education network of which this Enseña Por Mexico school is part.

One student is overjoyed as she unscrolls a rolled-up letter, revealing a flag and the words “Fuerza Mexico,” or Stay Strong, Mexico. “Ohh, que lindo, [how beautiful],” a little boy cries out while unfurling his note.

Angela, whose face is framed by hot pink glasses and missing front teeth that reveal her age, says that the cards were written “so that we won’t feel sad or scared.” Asked if it’s helped, she says yes.

“Don’t worry, everything will be OK,” says 9-year-old Emiliano Garcia Barrera, sharing his advice for other kids who might experience something similar. “Sooner or later, your fear will pass,” he says, noting that he was very scared, but didn’t cry.

“It won’t last all your life. And if you can make jokes and laugh, it will help you a lot.”

Michael McLoone/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

‘If you’re going to change a man’s life, you’re going to need God to do that,’ says Pastor Jerome Smith Sr.

On a gray, drizzly Wednesday morning, a line forms early at the back of Greater Praise Church of God in Christ, a windowless storefront church on Milwaukee’s northwest side. Soon it stretches out the door, and the hiss of tires on wet pavement drifts in among the pews, where the pastor is greeting his visitors.

“Good morning, sir! How are you?” he says. “What’s going on, girl?” A short, stocky man in his mid-40s with a thick neck and close-cropped hair, he shifts easily to pastoral sternness. “Fellas!” he exclaims. “Take your hat off in the sanctuary. Please!”

They have come here on a weekday morning seeking not salvation, but employment. And Pastor Jerome Smith Sr., who would resist such a strict distinction, is eager to help them. For two years he has run a program to connect inner-city workers, mostly African-American men, with jobs outside the city. Called the Joseph Project after the Old Testament figure, it not only helps them find work but also runs a van service to get them there, a trip that for some takes more than an hour.

The Joseph Project is a small effort to address two big problems: high urban unemployment and a growing geographical divide between where the jobless live and where the jobs are. These problems afflict many cities but have grown acute in Milwaukee. A forthcoming study estimates that nearly half of all working-age black men in Milwaukee are jobless. Meanwhile, companies outside the city complain they can’t find enough workers.

“Milwaukee has far more people than it has great-paying jobs, and some of our outskirts have great-paying jobs but don’t have people,” Pastor Smith says. “This was a good match.”

More than 150 people have found jobs through the Joseph Project. They work at large manufacturing and food processing companies in places such as Sheboygan, New Berlin, and Horicon, Wis. They man assembly and packaging lines in plants that make sausages, car parts, and roofing materials. Most work the second and third shifts. From one van a year ago, the transportation fleet has grown to five. Vans leave the church as early as 3:45 a.m. and as late as 9:50 p.m., bound for destinations north and west of the city.

For many people, the trip is worth the trouble. The jobs are mostly entry-level, paying $12 to $18.50 an hour. Smith says that’s better than most work available in Milwaukee, which includes retail and fast-food jobs and short-term work through temp agencies. Plus, the jobs outside the city have benefits that many workers in Milwaukee can only dream of.

“They’re getting 401(k)s,” Smith says. “Some are getting profit sharing. Health care, vision care, dental. Man, it’s unbelievable.”

Every Wednesday morning, Smith opens Greater Praise Church for an orientation. He selects the most promising applicants – he calls them “candidates” – for a week of training in soft skills such as interviewing and financial planning.

This Wednesday’s orientation has attracted an unusually large number: Forty-one candidates line up to fill out applications, then sit for the hourlong orientation. They include Gerry Brumfield Jr., who has come with his father. “This is my opportunity to start something new,” Mr. Brumfield says. In his early 30s, married, and the father of two children, he has worked at a dollar store and for a security company, but is now unemployed. Like many in the Joseph Project, he has a criminal record.

“A lot of people give up or go back to their old way of life,” he says. “I can’t. I can’t give up on myself.”

Smith says the biggest obstacle for candidates is drug testing. Many fail. Also, a lot of companies require a high school diploma or GED certificate, regardless of the work. A criminal record is no bar to employment, he says, but not every company is willing to overlook one.

“It’s a case-by-case basis,” he says. “If you’re honest about what’s happened in the past, and done what you had to do and learned from it, in most cases people can get around that.”

One company’s experience

Johnsonville, which makes sausages and other processed meat, was one of the first companies to join the Joseph Project. Headquartered in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., Johnsonville has struggled to find workers, says Heather Martin, a personnel executive. She says the social and spiritual aims of the Joseph Project appealed to the company.

“Once we understood the program and the power of the program, and the capability of the transportation, Johnsonville was all in,” she says.

The company has hired 14 workers from the Joseph Project. Nine are still working for Johnsonville. Five were dismissed for reasons it would not disclose. Four have been at Johnsonville more than a year. “We’re pleased with that,” Ms. Martin says.

The Joseph Project is part of a much larger effort to help Milwaukeeans find work. Other programs offer longer training, hoping to get workers into better-paying jobs in the trades. Some specialize in “reentry” – helping people coming out of prison. Construction projects that receive aid from the city are required to hire local workers.

But few programs transport workers to jobs beyond the city. One that does is the Milwaukee Careers Cooperative, which started such services in 1988 and uses 14-passenger vans to take about 300 workers to 10 work sites.

“It’s getting worse,” says John Possell, the cooperative’s transportation manager, of the challenges facing inner-city workers. “The big employers – the Amazons, the Ulines, and others – they need the large facilities, and they can’t locate those in the city. And that’s where you’re creating job numbers.”

Unlike other efforts, the Joseph Project is explicitly religious. Participants must promise to attend church – any church – at least twice a month. “If you’re going to change a man’s life, you’re going to need God to do that,” Smith says.

The pastor’s story

Smith knows from experience. He grew up in Chicago, in the Robert Taylor Homes, once the largest public housing project in the United States. When he was 12, his mother moved him and his sister to Milwaukee. He fathered a child, dropped out of high school, and went to work as a dishwasher operator at a pancake house.

He was better at work than school. He started a janitorial company, bought real estate, and became a mortgage broker.

In 1997, during a time of marital distress, he attempted suicide. He says the bullet from his .45 semiautomatic knocked him out and burned his chest, but otherwise left him unharmed.

He was in church the next Sunday. He became a deacon, then a minister. In 2014, he started his own church on a street marked by boarded-up buildings and vacant lots.

“Sometimes he amazes me, considering the background we came from,” says Sean Milan, a cousin who is close to him. “We came from nothing. Our families were born with nothing. We just made do. He was able to get a job and become something.”

The Joseph Project’s roots

The Joseph Project has roots in politics as much as in religion. It grew out of meetings that Orlando Owens, then in charge of African-American outreach for Wisconsin’s Republican Party, held with ministers in the Milwaukee area. The problem of unemployment loomed large, and when Mr. Owens went to work for US Sen. Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin, he and other members of Senator Johnson’s staff helped connect Smith with businesses north of Milwaukee.

Johnson and his staff continue to work closely with the project. This connection has helped make the Joseph Project famous in Republican circles. Politicians and conservative writers have extolled it as an example of how local initiatives and not government can overcome poverty and joblessness.

For his part, Smith says he’s not a Republican or Democrat. “I’m an issue-driven individual,” he says. He acknowledges that it would have been difficult to make the Joseph Project work without Johnson’s support: “He kicks open the doors of companies.”

Marc Levine, a labor expert at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says the Joseph Project is a “noble effort” to address the growing mismatch between where the workers are and where the work is. “We should have more voluntary efforts like that,” he says. But he notes that urban unemployment is a big problem with many causes, including segregation and the decline in manufacturing, and that transporting workers outside the city simply isn’t enough to solve the problem. “The notion that you’re going to make a dent in unemployment in Milwaukee by matching people with jobs in Sheboygan is fanciful,” he says.

The Wisconsin Employment Transportation Assistance Program is one source of funding for organizations that try to link up low-income workers with jobs. But the help has been small – the state has contributed less than $1 million annually in recent years – leaving the federal government and local sources to foot most of the bill.

“People have talked about employment transportation being an important issue for at least 10 years,” says Mr. Possell of the Milwaukee Careers Cooperative. “And yet nobody wants to put up the money to solve it.”

Smith admits that the reach of the Joseph Project is limited. “We’re not trying to change the world overnight,” he says. But he hopes to expand. Already he’s helped start a Joseph Project in Madison, Wis. And he’s working with people in other states.

The pastor is friendly but strict. On Wednesdays the church door locks at 10 a.m. “If you can’t get to orientation on time, you won’t get to work on time,” he says. The orientation is about more than imparting information; it’s Smith’s first chance to size up candidates. The mumbling young man in blue jeans, the wiseguy who doesn’t hear instructions – these candidates are unlikely to be invited back.

Dressing the part helps. “Turn around. Look at him, guys,” Smith says of a young man in a jacket and tie and freshly shined shoes. “That’s the way I roll when I’m looking for a job!”

‘It’s worth it’

Later that day, Michael Ewing, age 60, stands outside the church in a hooded jacket and knit cap, waiting for an afternoon ride to Nemak, an auto parts manufacturer in Sheboygan. Before the Joseph Project, he says, he worked through a temp agency at jobs offering low pay and uncertain hours. “It wasn’t stable,” he says.

Now he loads parts on a conveyor for what he describes as “astronomical” pay – about $17 an hour – and “top-of-the-line benefits.” He says the compensation and steady work on Nemak’s second shift more than make up for the hourlong commute from Milwaukee, which comes on top of a 20-minute bus ride to get to the church each day.

“It’s worth it,” he says. “It definitely is.”

He says he’s surprised more people don’t know about the Joseph Project.

“I’d recommend it to anyone looking for work.”

How to take action

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Norbert von der Groeben

This photo from 2014 shows the reflectivity of the mirror-like optical surface that Stanford University researchers have been studying, which allows for daytime radiative sky cooling by sending thermal energy into the sky while also blocking sunlight. The people in this photo (left to right) are Linxiano Zhu, Shanhui Fan, and Aaswath Raman.

Researchers may have found a way to make refrigerators and air conditioners more efficient: Just shoot the heat into space.

Using a natural optical phenomenon called radiative sky cooling, a group of scientists-turned-entrepreneurs has developed roof panels that they say could reduce the energy needed to cool homes, offices, supermarkets, and data centers. Elegant in its passivity and its simplicity, their new application may represent a considerable, if incremental, step toward rethinking how we build our homes and places of business. And it could even provide clues about how to make existing structures more efficient.

“I think the elegance of it appealed to me,” says Aaswath Raman, a research associate at Stanford University in California and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature Energy last month that describes the radiative cooling panels. “It’s to make something that’s a very good non-absorber of sunlight and, at the same time, a very good emitter of heat away.”

Most of the heat radiated by objects on Earth is absorbed by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and re-emitted back to the surface. But Earth’s greenhouse effect isn’t a perfect seal. Some infrared wavelengths of radiation can slip through the atmosphere and pass into space. That heat loss produces an effect known as radiative sky cooling.

For the cooling effect to work, an object must face the sky directly – a physical obstruction, such as a tree or building, will absorb and re-emit any thermal energy that is released. Under certain conditions, the cooling phenomenon can bring an object’s temperature below that of the surrounding air. That’s why frost can form on cloudless nights, even when ambient temperatures stay above freezing. To harness this natural quirk is to use deep space as a kind of heat sink.

The panels developed by Dr. Raman and his colleagues exploit this phenomenon, cooling water to temperatures below that of the ambient air, no electricity needed. The water could then be circulated through the building to cool its interior.

Sophisticated passive cooling technologies have existed for millennia. By 400 BC, engineers in present-day Iran had mastered the art of building yakhchāls, or ice pits. By running water along the inside of clay domes – an early evaporative cooling system – one could keep the pit cool enough to store ice in the sweltering summer months.

Passive cooling has its limitations, however. On a clear day, the sun’s heat will usually offset any cooling effect.

“Some architects started looking at it in the ’60s and ’70s, with the main caveat being that it only worked at night,” says Raman. “It never really took off as a technology, because it became rather complex to use something that only worked at night to deliver cooling during the day.”

In 2014, Mr. Raman and his Stanford colleagues found a workaround. With $3 million in funding from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, they developed highly reflective panels that could harness the sky cooling effect while blocking up to 97 percent of solar light. Placed on a roof under direct sunlight, their panels stayed 8.8 degrees F. cooler than the surrounding air – a cooling power of 40.1 watts per square meter. Last year, three of those researchers founded SkyCool Systems, of which Raman is chief executive officer.

Researchers generally agree that radiative cooling technologies such as the one developed by SkyCool could translate to significant long-term energy savings in new buildings. But retrofitting still presents a considerable challenge: In a 2015 analysis by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., researchers found that material and installation costs made SkyCool’s technology unsuitable for existing structures.

“The use of radiative cooling technology requires completely different types of building components,” says Srinivas Katipamula, who co-authored the analysis. “Only when existing buildings are completely torn down for a retrofit is it possible to use radiative cooling technologies. We have to look at existing buildings if we are to make a big dent in reducing energy consumption, because much of the consumption is associated with those buildings.”

To that end, Raman’s company has shifted focus toward a new mode of integration: solar water coolers. Such a system would use the same radiative panels to cool fluid in a closed loop. In recent field trials, his team successfully retrofitted the condenser component of off-the-shelf commercial refrigeration and air conditioning systems.

“In this particular trial, we’re targeting something like a 10 to 20 percent improvement in efficiency on an annual basis,” says Raman. “For something like refrigeration, that’s actually a big deal. If you think about supermarkets and other cold storage facilities, keeping things quite cold or even frozen is an expensive proposition.”

With potential savings like that, radiative cooling could represent a step forward in a growing “zero-energy design” movement, which advocates building structures that produce at least as much energy as they consume.

The movement has grown steadily in the last decade. Earlier this year, Austin, Texas, unveiled a new housing development of 7,500 net-zero-energy homes – the largest in the country. That growth can be partially attributed to trends in solar energy, says Nathan Johnson, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies energy markets and renewables.

“Solar prices have dropped significantly, and subsidies are set to remain until at least 2020, so the incentives to install distributed solar are strong,” says Professor Johnson. “The market has grown sufficiently that standard business practices in an open market will take things forward.”

Residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s total energy consumption in 2016, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Of that, 6 to 8 percent was used specifically for cooling, while at the same time creating emissions that contribute to global warming.

But cutting-edge technology can’t always replace good engineering, says L.D. Danny Harvey, a University of Toronto climatology professor and author of “A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District-Energy Systems.” By reducing the need for cooling in the first place, developers can make simple choices to improve efficiency in the long-run.

“You minimize solar heat gain by minimizing the window areas facing west, and you use windows that permit very little solar heat to get in,” says Professor Harvey. “If it’s west-facing, you have adjustable external blinds. If it’s south-facing, you have an overhead which will shade it in the summer and let in sunlight in the winter. You do sensible things like that to reduce the need for both heating and cooling.”

Existing buildings can be improved through window glazing and double-skin facades, which reduce solar penetration and improve ventilation. It’s a scaled-back approach, Harvey admits, and it won’t make an old building energy neutral. But since more than half of the US housing stock was built before 1980, according to a report by the National Association of Home Builders, even small gains in efficiency could add up.

“We’re going to have to retrofit the entire building stock of all the countries in the world,” says Harvey. “Maybe you can renovate 2 percent a year – you’re talking a 40-50 year period, so that takes us to 2060 or so. But at the same time we’re converting the electricity grid entirely to renewable energy. And we’re implementing ever-more stringent standards for new buildings, and we’re making more and more of the new buildings net-zero or close to it.”

Yasmina Chavez/Las Vegas Sun via AP

Volunteers help unload water brought by the Las Vegas community for the people taking refuge inside the Thomas & Mack Center following the Oct. 2 mass shooting.

When the final history of the Las Vegas mass killing is written, it will not be complete without a mass retelling of how people responded during the carnage:

Of how strangers helped strangers escape the sniper’s bullets. Of how concertgoers fell on others to shield them. Of how Nevada’s first responders quickly found the shooter and rescued hundreds. And of how Americans prayed and found unity as they mourned the dozens lost and sought to comfort the families.

The reason such tales are important is that they reflect the very qualities – such as poise, sacrifice, and compassion – needed to help prevent another mass killing. Shooters like Stephen Paddock generally act out of anger, fear, or hopelessness, even though on the surface they may seem suicidal or driven by ideology. Many of them seek to evoke in others the dark emotions they feel. Yet the rest of society cannot mirror the deeper angst of a killer. The more a tragedy’s inspiring acts of love and courage are highlighted, the easier it would be for people to influence troubled individuals prone to violence.

A cycle of hate or fear must be broken quickly. Within 12 hours of the Las Vegas killings, for example, government officials were expressing public gratitude for the hundreds of volunteers, police, health workers, and others who saved lives and acted without hesitation. Even as officials spoke of collective solutions such as tighter gun laws or better protection for public events, they sought to reinforce the qualities that can counter the evil behind such violence.

Or as President Trump told the nation in a TV address: “[I]t is our love that defines us today. And always will. Forever.” His words were similar to those of President Barack Obama after another mass killing here in the United States: “Scripture teaches us, ‘God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.’ ”

As Americans discuss what new measures might prevent another mass shooting, they should recall the traits of character displayed during the night of Oct. 1. What happened in Las Vegas in response to the killings should not stay in Las Vegas.