Solutions became dissolutions here, the illogical logical.

So I sat alone at Bunny Friend playground, in a neighborhood one might describe as rampy. I could look on my phone, at media photographs of the incident, and see exactly where the bodies had been felled: the woman on her side over here; the man being rolled away on a gurney over there. Who was looking out the windows at me now? They were invisible—but maybe not so invisible—behind curtains. The playground was just a patch, where it had been a Roman coliseum, and I was reminded of those Civil War battlefields, cluttered with ghosts and silence, energy fields and densities so rooted in the past that they deny the present. We were in the middle of the city—and yet nothing moved here. The current, the substance, was fear—and I felt it, too. Four, five blocks as I drove away—that's when I saw my first person. He was in a wheelchair.

5.

It began, begins, will begin again. With a sound, reported as a dull crack. A firecracker in the distance. A backfire, a chair tipped, hitting the floor.

It's a shift of air, an exhale. It will begin with a thud, a whimper.

On a robin's-egg-blue morning in paradise—in my town, yours; at the intersection; on the subway—there will be a repeating report. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Glass veins, like frazil ice. Someone will jerk, as if stung by a bee. Another. Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk. The swarm is suddenly everywhere. People flail to a music that can't be heard. Bodies disassemble in strange slow motion. Someone's elbow explodes, a head vanishes, the carnage horrific. Everyone else flees, squeezing wherever they fit. Someone calls 911, someone else. It doesn't seem real. How could it be? Here we are at our prayer group, at our holiday party, in our home. There's the polite man you work with, the classmate, the harmless stranger—now wearing a black tactical vest, swaddled in ammo. Why? It's a prank, an audition. It can't be real.

But it will be.

Now, a siren will sound in the distance, another. You are becoming part of a historical event, too, soon to be forgotten, and then repeated. The sprinkler system engages. It will be raining inside, a cold shower. The paper decorations are matted to the floor. The fire alarm emits a piercing sound, along with the continuing pop of gunfire. Wailing now, the injured. Except for the sleeping body, leg askew. And the others, sleeping, too. On the scanner, the voice of law enforcement will be pitched: active shooter… officer down… request medical aid. The news carries like an electrical storm. A bulletin on TV, the whupping of helicopter rotors overhead, someone at or near the scene begins to narrate. If it's ratings-worthy, we interrupt the following program.

Now is when the traffic stops.

And we pause. There will be injured, and there will be dead. We will begin with the obvious questions: Who is the shooter (age, occupation, etc.)? What is his psychological profile? Where did he get the gun?

The last question will be maddening, because if answered honestly, each and every time we'll realize that we gave it to the killer ourselves. By amnesia, inaction, or the true belief that every American should own a gun, if they want. But why, then, will we be so surprised, outraged even, when they—the neighbor, the zealot, the racist, the paranoid schizophrenic—use it?

6.

Ten days, then, without blinking; it comes in a swirl. In Seattle, the shooting occurs in front of a supermarket, around 1 A.M., perhaps gang-related, as well. A plate-glass window shatters, leaving jewels on the sidewalk, while, of the three women rushed away by ambulance, one hovers in “red condition,” with a life-threatening injury. In Newburgh, New York, in a dive bar jammed between an electrical-supply store and a Mexican bodega, an argument breaks out over nothing remembered, weapons are drawn, five are maimed. In Brownsville, Texas, the incident takes place in front of a nightclub, the alleged shooter with a tattoo above his right eye: CELTA. He flees, then later turns himself in, perhaps realizing he isn't going to get very far with a giant CELTA tattoo above his right eye. And in Chicago, on a day when three people are otherwise shot dead/erased/vanished, an early-afternoon visit to Soap Opera Laundromat results in yet another altercation, four people wounded in the gunfire.

Monday, here is Barry Kirk again, in his gray sweatshirt, crossing the street again in Columbus. In Minneapolis, the alleged shooter at the Black Lives Matter protest makes a video while in transit. In it, he and two of his buddies wear bandannas to hide their faces, aping Tarantino lowlifes, glorifying themselves by the gun they carry. It's uncomfortable to watch, these losers in action, gathering themselves for what they think will be a meaningful gesture, their hero moment. One of the black men they're about to shoot will require stomach surgery, but lives. The shooter says he's there “to make the fire rise.” He's convinced his gun throws the flame.

Then, there's Charleston—two groups of men, each allegedly with a beef against the other, opening fire. The gun is adept at conflict resolution, shuts everyone up equally. In Boston, outside a bar on Yawkey Way called Who's on First, Jephthe Chery, a “God-fearing” Haitian immigrant and well-loved transit employee, gets caught and killed in a crossfire—and so goes his American Dream. By the time Robert Dear, the anti-abortionist, takes his Friday drive to Colorado Springs, in hunting cap and trench coat, with a long rifle and two propane tanks in his truck, he must think himself on the cusp of herohood, too. But he isn't the only one. As Dear barricades himself in the Planned Parenthood office for five hours after already having killed a police officer and two friends of women with appointments at the facility, a local citizen approaches the police, strapped with a handgun and ammunition vest, offering to go in. The police demur. How many citizens with guns can one Friday afternoon endure?

Then: San Bernardino.

Ten days, 14 reasons, from terrorism to protest, suicidal nihilism to revenge, Old Testament plotlines included, replete with angry loners, half-wits, gangbangers, and normal people snapping, practicing their right to free speech with a gun. You get an eye-for-an-eye, and in this case it looks like more than 100 with shot-up bodies of varying severity (this one unable to use her hand; this one partially paralyzed; this one with a bullet in his groin), and 27 funerals. Times those ten days by 36—there's your rough year, America.

Makes you believe that it's the whole, not just the part, that's rampy.

7.

History evaporates, but here we are again. From the hotel desk, she can see the traffic moving. And that's when we begin to forget again…

8.

In San Bernardino, I met a network correspondent on the street, at a makeshift memorial site near the Inland Regional Center. She works in breaking news: excellent at what she does, intense, what under different circumstances one might call “locked in.” In the past months, she'd covered the shooting at a Charleston church (nine dead) and the terrorist attacks in Paris (130 dead), and here yet another (14 dead). She told me that at a vigil we both attended the evening before, she'd been moved by a woman who felt a hopelessness that seemed to speak for many of us, that spilled with emotion. Except the woman kept talking. Nothing would be done about this violence—or ISIS—she said, until we got rid of the Muslim in the White House, until one of his children was shot.

“Everyone is coming from their own place and experience,” the correspondent told me. “It's impossible to generalize these communities.”

She said when she's lost in the details of her job—knocking on doors, booking interviews, writing and filming and posting on deadline—she's all adrenaline and not professionally able to get too emotional. (That comes later.) She said that she can almost immediately predict the trajectory and audience interest, “as terrible as it sounds.” (For instance, CNN saw its ratings increase 280 percent over the first 12 hours in San Bernardino.) Later, I sent her an e-mail, asking her to explain further, and she wrote back, breaking it down.

“If the assailants are still at large, an active manhunt, the coverage will be constant and revolve mostly on tracking them down,” she wrote. “If they are killed, the high level of interest in the story will be over sooner, especially if motive is determined quickly. There will be a few days of memorials and police press conferences grappling for a motive, looks into the lives of these killers, but it will peter out.… If they are caught alive, the life cycle is a bit longer.… There is a formula, though, and sadly after the killer is gone or imprisoned, the flowers die at the memorials and the press packs up, these communities are widely ignored by the national media.”