This past week when a gunman entered a California music bar and started firing, people in the club hid, smashed windows to escape and ran out of back doors. They were not paralyzed by fear as been the case in many mass shootings.  What is perhaps even more terrifying is that the public has become used to mass shootings.  In fact, several of the people at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks this past Wednesday had been through a mass shooting before — when the Las Vegas gunman opened fire on a crowd of country music fans last year, killing 58. 

“Unfortunately, these young people have learned that this may happen,” Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said following Wednesday’s shooting by a Marine combat veteran that left 12 dead in Thousand Oaks.

A woman stands at a memorial outside the Tree of Life synagogue after a shooting there left 11 people dead

The number of active-shooter scenarios are rocketing skyward, according to a new FBI report, jumping from 40 during 2014-15 to 50 during 2016-17.  Moreover, the number increased from 20 in 2016 to 30 in 2017, with nearly 1,000 casualties in 21 states — a total of 221 killed and 722 wounded, for a total of 943, not including the shooters — and that doesn’t even count all gun deaths, the FBI said. 

“This report does not encompass all gun-related situations,” said the federal law enforcement agency in an 18-page report, Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017. 

“Rather, it focuses on a specific type of shooting situation. The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Implicit in this definition is the shooter’s use of one or more firearms.”

It’s a jump from such incidents in 2014-2015, when a total of 40 rampages in 26 states took the lives of 92 people and wounded 139. In both sets of years, 20 of the shootings met the further definition of “mass killing,” the FBI said. 

The FBI report identified the 50 shooters in 2016-17 as “all male,” ranging in age from 14 to 66 years old. The previous two years showed 42 shooters, 39 men and three women. Six of the shootings occurred in Texas, the FBI said, with five each in California and Florida, four in Ohio, and three in Maryland and Washington State.  Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin each saw two such incidents, and Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina logged one each.  

The 2017 numbers were spiked, the FBI said, by the murder of 58 country music fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas; the gunning down of 49 revelers at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and the massacre of 26 worshipers at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The Las Vegas shooting was the biggest mass casualty incident, the report said, with 489 injured in addition to the deaths.

The latest report comes as the nation mourns anew at the most recent carnage, when an ex-Marine burst into Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and mowed down 12 people. The gunman also died, bringing the total fatality count to 13. More than a dozen were wounded. The club which was packed with college students and others enjoying a country music event,

According to a broader mass-killing definition by the Gun Violence Archive, an online repository of incidents culled from media, law enforcement, government and commercial sources, it was the nation’s 307^th mass shooting in 311 days.

Firefighters raise a flag to hang over the procession carrying the body of Ventura County Sheriff Sergeant Ron Helus, who was killed at the Borderline Bar and Grill

Even in a country that has become accustomed to gun massacres, the idea that some Americans have lived through not one, but two attacks is startling.  “It’s insane is the only way to describe it,” California’s Democratic Governor-elect Gavin Newsom said.  “The normalization, that’s the only I can describe it. It’s become normalized.” 

The southern California slaughter came on the heels of another massacre, when Robert Bowers, who openly spewed extreme anti-Semitic invective, allegedly burst into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 Jewish worshippers. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in which at least four people were shot or killed, said the Thousand Oaks assault was the 307th mass shooting this year.

In other words, a mass shooting takes place somewhere in America almost daily.  Back-to-back shootings have left many Americans feeling jaded to the horror, said Gregg Carter, a sociology professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island. “A constant bombardment of bad news is unhealthy for us both mentally and physically,” he told AFP. “Americans are turning themselves off emotionally to mass shootings as a self-protection mechanism.”

A sort of switch-off can be seen in the media too.  Whereas a mass shooting used to dominate the news cycle for a week or more and garner saturation cable news coverage, such incidents nowadays are receiving much less air time. This “public fatigue or fatalism” is partly due to a barrage of other big events crowding out the story, and partly it’s because political debate about how to address the problem is stuck, noted Robert Spitzer, political science professor at the State University of New York, College at Cortland.  Guns rights are enshrined in the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution and Republicans are loathe to discuss any sort of gun control, often reacting to gun violence by offering “thoughts and prayers” to the victims but little else. “However, the gun issue is more on the minds of voters than ever, and there is good reason to believe that support for stronger gun laws is a winning issue for candidates this year,” Spitzer told AFP.  

The mother of a young man who survived last year’s gun massacre in Las Vegas, only to be killed by the California gunman, made an impassioned plea for gun control. “I don’t want prayers, I don’t want thoughts, I want gun control and I hope to God nobody else sends me more prayers. I want gun control. No. More. Guns,” said Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, whose son Telemachus was a 27-year US Navy veteran.

Another somber reflection of America’s mass shooting crisis can be seen around Washington and across the country, where flags on government property are flying at half-mast. In a flag-obsessed nation, the frequency with which the Stars and Stripes now flutters in mourning is hard not to notice.  When it was lowered Thursday, barely a week had gone by since it was raised again following the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. 

A look at past presidential proclamations ordering the flag down shows it has been at half-mast for 19 days so far this year after mass shootings, compared to 15 days for all other reasons combined. Fear is growing, Carter said, pointing to a Gallup poll after the Las Vegas shooting found that 40 percent of Americans are “worried” that they or a family member will become a mass-shooting victim.