As word spread of the latest school shooting in America—as the cable networks began their inexorable shift away from the frivolity of a Friday with little going on, and made their well-rehearsed turns towards covering the newest tragedy; and the anchors talked about how many such shootings they'd covered before; and Twitter let loose with its all-too-familiar mixture of real time information and misinformation; and people waited for the inevitable reports of injuries or deaths; and the awful statistics started being discussed ( over 33,000 gun deaths since Newtown, at least 24 school shootings since Newtown); and people took in the fact that the site of the shooting was minutes away from the site of the Columbine and Aurora shootings; and the world had not yet moved on because, thankfully, there were no immediate casualties and the shooter was dead—CNN's Tom Foreman came on the air and said something that seemed to sum up the awful feeling of ordinariness that has attached itself to shootings:
"I would argue that there may be no community in this country better prepared to handle all of this than Denver and its suburbs, simply because they went through it and there is an institutional knowledge there among the police officers, among school officials, among the state officers—they do know how to handle this and they have an idea of how to deal with it...they have been ground zero for this for a long time."
This, it would seem, is where things are in a country beset by these kinds of events over and over: something that should be a horrible aberration is instead common enough for everybody—the media, the government, the police—to slip back into a mode they know all too well.