Earlier this month, the nation was gripped by yet another fatal rampage, this time in San Bernardino, California, where 14 people were killed and 21 injured at a civic center for the developmentally disabled.

It came less than a week after a man identified by authorities as Robert Lewis Dear Jr. stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three and injuring nine. And depending on who you ask, it happened on the same day as another “mass shooting” in Savannah, Georgia.

British news network BBC opened their segment on the violence in San Bernardino with a resonating lead:

BBC report tonight: "Just another day in the United States of America..." pic.twitter.com/ikw41FLbgz

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 2, 2015

"Just another day in the United States of America, another day of gunfire, panic and fear," says the BBC commentator. "This time in the city of San Bernardino in California, where a civic building was apparently under attack."

It was an expression of our collective numbness, our weary-eyed deja vu. To say nothing of the of schools and officers and movie theaters, San Bernardino wasn’t even the first civic center in recent memory to bear witness to massacre.

A gunman bursts into an immigrant services center in Binghamton, New York, and shot 13 people to death, critically wounding four others. President Obama issues his condolences, calls it a “senseless act of violence.” A Gallup poll shows a spike in American concerns about gun control. Advocates pounce on the National Rifle Association. Both sides of the political aisle hotly debate, argue about if and how this could have been prevented.

Wait, when was that?

February 2009. It was one of the first “lone wolf” rampages to take place after President Obama’s inauguration. But from the crime scene to the prayer vigils to the media backlash, it’s a serviceable outline of what’s happening right now as we head into 2016.

When prevention becomes a pipe dream, people turn their ire towards increasingly petty things.

It is worth noting that Columbine left nearly the same number dead and wounded as this month’s bloodbath in San Bernardino, but to many Americans, the 1999 high school shooting represented a turning point in the discussion of mass shootings in America.

Yet somewhere along this body-strewn road — long after Columbine, years before Charleston, perhaps around Aurora and almost definitely after Sandy Hook — people got the sense that nothing was going to change. We acquired a new piece of conventional wisdom: If the murder of 20 children in an elementary school wouldn’t bring about a serious response, nothing will.

So the body count keeps rising. The partisan response becomes more shrill. And by some strange logic, the conversation after each mass shooting finds new ways to reinvent itself.

For example, nitpicking definitions of violence.

The big analysis that swept headlines was that San Bernardino marked the 351st “mass shooting” of this year, according to data collected from the crowdsourced site shootingtracker.com. Critics connected the dots to highlight that, by this definition, there had been far more mass shootings than calendar days in 2015. 

But outlets like the National Review were quick to call this figure “wildly misleading.” The traditional definition of a mass shooting, according to the F.B.I., is one in which four or more people are killed, including the shooter. Up until recently, even left-wing outlets were using that metric. But shootingtracker.com changed the narrative by defining a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are injured, adding hundreds of more "mass shootings" to the tally. 

It’s not just about semantics.

After the October shooting that claimed nine at Umpqua Community College, journalists and reporters were criticized for the “insensitive” practice of mining Twitter to connect with eyewitnesses on campus. In 2012, the breaking news press corps came under fire for interviewing traumatized students after the Sandy Hook shooting. “Tragedy vampires,” one journalist said of his tribe.

Following the San Bernardino shooting, the New York Daily News ran a cover story slamming Republican politicians who offered their prayers in the hours after the bloodbath. Read the lede: “...Cowards who could truly end the gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.”

These are, of course, examples of meta-response. They are reactions to reactions. And in many ways, they serve only to distract us from the central issue. But when prevention becomes a pipe dream, people turn their ire towards increasingly petty things.

The next mass shooting in the U.S. is probably only hours or days away. And as the needle remains unmoved on gun control and mental illness, you can expect the conversation to continue on its inward spiral.