The rampage that claimed at least 14 lives in San Bernardino, California, isn't today's first mass shooting. Here's news you probably missed: A gunman in Savannah, Georgia, shot four people early Wednesday, killing a woman and injuring three men.
Police haven't arrested a suspect, said Eunicia Baker, spokesperson for the Savannah Chatham Police Department. They also haven't released the names of the victims, and the three men are expected to recover. There was little acknowledgment of the incident in news media: One local television station covered the shootings in three paragraphs.
And the world spun on.
Then news broke that multiple attackers opened fire at a center for disabled adults in San Bernardino - a center that just hosted its holiday party yesterday.
Suddenly, the little-noticed crime in Georgia became the second mass shooting in a single day - and the third since Robert L. Dear Jr. opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic last week in Colorado springs.
After the Colorado Springs shootings, President Barack Obama declared that this type of violence must not "become normal." But as The Washington Post's Chris Ingraham points out, the data show that mass shootings are already normal. There have been more mass shootings than calendar days this year.
News reports collected by a Reddit community show there have been 355 mass shootings in 2015. The Mass Shooting Tracker, as its called, differs from other shooting databases in that it uses a broader definition than the FBI's old four-fatality rule: If bullets strike four people in the same attack, that's a mass shooting.
The big ones, of course, attract the national media, comments from the president, cries of terrorism. The small ones . . . well, they have become just another police report in the United States.