A quantum of umbrage: Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

It was eight days ago that the shooter opened fire at Umpqua Community College, down I-5 from where I'm sitting now.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . 

This morning, I hadn't been up long when I read about the shooting at Northern Arizona University. It happened about 1:20am Pacific time.

Well, we made it over a week, I thought. That's better than our average for 2015. (I was wrong; there had been four mass shootings in the US – including three separate incidents in Baltimore – since the Umpqua CC incident last week. But we'll let my blissful ignorance pass for the moment.)

Then at or shortly after noon noon Pacific time today came a second shooting – the Texas Southern University announced the campus lockdown at 10:27am Central, making it roughly eleven hours after the first incident this morning.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

Jesus, I thought to myself, we can't even make it a full 24 hours without a shooting like this anymore. I expressed to a friend the dim hope that maybe the mass shooters in the US, like the rest of us, would be knocking off early on Friday afternoon, giving the 24-hour nobody-got-shot clock a break.

Nope. The campus-wide text alert for the third shooting today, this time at Jefferson Technical and Community College in Louisville KY, went out at 3:39pm Eastern – a little less than half an hour after the TSU lockdown.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

We don't need a 24-hour clock, I would have muttered into my drink, if I'd had one. We need an egg timer.

This is way we've chosen to live things in this country. We're not going to do anything about it. That's been clear for almost two years.

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— Dan Hodges (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

Yup. We're just going to let it happen. We feel terrible, and we waste no time Facebooking our thoughts and prayers, and we give the families and community time to mourn, and we probably create a new hashtag, and then . . . we reset the egg-timer and move on.

And, if we're gun fetishists and Obama-haters like the first-name-only dimwits in Roseburg today, we insist that even the merest hint of a suggestion of the possibility of considering it's finally time to consider initial steps to reigning in this disease is the very height of bad taste.

And if we're 2016 GOP presidential wannabes, we just want to change the subject.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . 

Dead . . . dead . . . dead . . .