No More. Please.

A shooting. Another shooting.  I woke up yesterday morning to news of one more mass shooting, this one the deadliest recorded in this country.  The news reports referred to it as “today’s shooting”, which I suppose differentiates it from last week’s or last month’s or last year’s shooting. My heart is heavy. I can’t allow myself to believe that as a society we’ve become numb but have these occurrences become so commonplace that we take another horrific event like this in stride?  We hear the news, we cry, we mourn, we pray or we curse or do both and then we move forward.  And we wait, seemingly not as surprised at the next awful event as we were at the last.  Not unlike people exposed to repeated horrors in conflict and actual war zones, our sensitivity seems to have become less. When was it that these hideous events came to be a normal part of our lives?  When did they cease to be unexpected?  And then there’s the aftermath, which fosters hate and fear and then more hate and more fear and the cycle replays itself.  Please.  No more. Nothing that could be referred to as tomorrow’s shooting.