The NRA has won. I'm still saddened, but no longer shocked by school shootings

I remember when that middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas had an ambush style shooting back in 1998. The two boys involved murdered four students and teacher. My dad, just back from a business trip to Arkansas, got drunk and depressed and shouted "What the hell is going on there?!" at the internet, scouring futilely for information. I remember being walloped by the news--I'd just gone back to teaching myself and couldn't quite wrap my mind around how anyone could set up a cold ambush like that. It just didn't seem plausible. The fact revealed soon after that the murderers were adolescents themselves only elevated the numbing shock of the events.

Fifteen years later, hundreds of campus murders by heavily armed men and boys later, I'm a different kind of numb. I mean, I'm sad and I'm disheartened by yet another shooting today--if I thought about it, I would probably cry for the family, or maybe yet families, in Nevada who have lost a precious young one to this ugly trend. But it doesn't surprise me anymore. I'm as disconnected to it as I am to the starving kids in Haiti, to the kids killed by terror bombings in Baghdad, to the bystanders killed by drone strikes in Yemen, to the gassings in Syria, to the armed drug cartels in northern Mexico. In an abstract sense, I would like to see the killings stopped. I just don't have any hope for change in the status quo anymore.