Graham Kislingbury

The Fort Hood shootings were tragic and horrific. My heart goes out to the families and friends of the 12 soldiers and one civilian who were killed and the 31 who were injured by the gunman Thursday.

But the news from Fort Hood was not shocking. Maybe that’s because I work for newspapers and we’re used to dealing with awful news. Or perhaps it’s because I’m 56 years old and I’m not as surprised or shocked by events as I was 20 or 30 years ago. But I think a more plausible reason is because mass shootings, unfortunately, have become so commonplace.

I pored over AP’s list of some of the worst mass fatal shootings since 1991. Among the 14 on the list were Columbine in 1999 with 12 dead, and Virginia Tech in 2006 with 32 fatalities (And, yes, the suspect in the 13 Fort Hood killings was a 1997 graduate of Virginia Tech.)

I counted a total of 167 dead on AP’s list. That includes shooters who took their own lives. Those shootings occurred in eight years, so the average is more than 20 senseless deaths per year.

The average is low, however, because AP’s did not list other horrible shootings, including the Springfield killings in May 1998. Kip Kinkel, 15 at the time, shot his mother and father to death at home, then went to his high school, Thurston, for a shooting rampage that left two students dead and 25 others wounded.

Since the school shootings of the late 1990s, I’ve had an ongoing prayer — that our country will get through each year without a mass shooting. We did OK in the early part of this decade, but since 2005 there has been at least one mass shooting a year and a total of 10.

We still have a lot of prayers to say — and work to do.

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