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.