COLORADO SPRINGS — It had been just five days since a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic put Kentanya Craion in the middle of a massacre that left her cowering in a back room and her boyfriend among the three dead.

And then she watched in horror on her mother’s television as the shooting here was eclipsed by another, deadlier, more spectacular mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. “Disgusting,” Ms. Craion said. “I can’t imagine how the families are feeling.”

She paused and corrected herself: “I know how they’re feeling. I know exactly how they’re feeling.”

This was the distinctly and distressingly American nightmare in which the people of Colorado Springs found themselves this month: grieving, confused and emotionally raw — but with all of those emotions amplified and distorted by a new mass shooting in a country where, by one measure, such attacks occur on average more than once a day.

And the shooting in California, which claimed 14 lives, siphoned much of the national focus from Colorado Springs, replacing a high-intensity conversation about violence against abortion clinics with perhaps an even more intense one about violence committed by Islamic terrorists.