Her tiny, pink plastic chair was back in the living room on Monday, looking better suited to a doll than a person.

Then 2-year-old Mackensyie zoomed past, proving that her chair was not too big and not too small, but just right.

"That's the chair that was on the news," said her dad, Aaron Wallace.

Mackensyie, with her chair, was in the courtyard of her East Side apartment when a gunbattle on Wednesday wounded two bystanders who are her friends: 2-year-old Mia Marshall and Mia's 8-year-old brother, Kyle.

"She was right in between them," Wallace said. "She froze. She didn't try to run."

Read more: ‘Call the police! They shot my kids!’ father yelled as neighbors come to aid

Call it luck or fate or God's good grace, but Mackensyie was unharmed in the shooting at 4:20 p.m. in the 400 block of Mayfair Boulevard. Mia Marshall is out of the hospital, but her brother remains there after a series of surgeries to repair the damage wrought by a bullet that struck him in his belly.

Their brush with death on the streets of our city occurred less than a week ago and just one day after another of Columbus' children, 9-year-old Maniya Cannon, survived her own close call. On July 4, a bullet was fired into her house and grazed her cheek as she slept. On Sunday morning, a fourth child — this time a 15-year-old girl — was grazed by a bullet that entered her Hilltop home.

Four children scarred by random violence, three of them during a week in which we celebrated our nation's birth. That's not counting Mackensyie, or who knows how many other psychologically wounded victims.

Not even a week has passed, and this is not being talked about. Not even a week has passed, and it is quiet enough to hear a brass shell casing drop to the pavement.

Because in a year rife with killing, these children were only wounded.

Since they were shot, four people have been killed in acts of violence in Columbus. That brings Columbus' homicide count in 2017 to 70. There have been 23 more victims than there were at this point last year. If that pace continues, 2017 could rival 1991 as the worst on record.

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"It's on to the next story, the next shooting," Aaron Wallace, 36, said as he got ready for his shift at the Dr Pepper warehouse near John Glenn Columbus International Airport. "It's never stopping. It never stops."

It's been the same wherever Wallace has lived. Detroit. Cleveland. Here in central Ohio.

He doesn't place blame on anyone but the young men — and it is almost always young men — who have learned to settle even the pettiest disputes by lethal means.

"Senseless, my man," he said. "That's the biggest word I can use. A lot of these kids, they're trying to prove themselves. People be fighting over nothing. The disagreements ain't that serious."

He doesn't fault the cops for the glut of violence.

"Police are doing their job, in my eyes," he said.

He said he even understands the lack of a public outcry. It is human nature to protect your own, he said, and to focus only on the immediate threats to your own. If gun violence seems a distant possibility, more imminent concerns take precedence.

"At the end of the day, it don't affect us until it hits home," he said. As it did for him last week.

Mackensyie raced down the steps and through the living room, barreling toward the kitchen for a Rice Krispies Treat.

On the corner near her apartment building, in view of Fairmoor Elementary School, another child picked up a small rock and launched it toward the street after winding up like a major-league pitcher. Five miles away in Nationwide Children's Hospital, Kyle Marshall hung on as doctors labored to mend what they can.

The rest of us averted our eyes. We turned our backs. We looked the other way.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker