Another school, another attack – more victims, more shooting. Hundreds of other young victims affected by the ripples of loss, fear, anger and helplessness. We have seen it all before.

The women around me acknowledged the news, but when I suggested that gun control in Australia had been altered after one such disaster, the air was almost visibly choked with a shut down, a motionless space that froze out any discussion.

Was this shock or embarrassment? I couldn’t tell, because it was a group reaction I had never seen before. And, as the day wore on I continued to see other strange responses to what, in my eyes, is the greatest avoidance “cover up” of local and national murder … by individuals, authorities and the lack of will of a nation.

It’s as if the US is eating itself from the inside, while many people seem to be in a thoughtless, senseless and overriding rapture about guns and what they offer.

The day continued with TV interviews with some first responders, their bosses and low-level politicians. Parents with rescued children stood next to their kids and gave strangely unemotional accounts about what they saw and heard. 

A mayor said the perpetrator was “pure evil”, as if to allow everyone apart from the killer to escape responsibility for the shooting. We know that the perpetrator was a sick young man. We are told his adoptive mother died last year. I don’t think he was pure evil. The deaths were pure evil though because, though this young man was receiving help, he still had legal access to guns. Who is responsible for this, and why? And in how many ways are those gun control deniers facilitating these acts of evil?

There is much in America to love, but there is a great open wound at its heart that is festering. There will be a tipping point sometime. Which way will America tip?

What moral code or plain good sense will bring the right to gun access to an end? And why do so many Americans hang onto to their outdated, dangerous and wacky interpretation about guns and their meaning.

Surely a child is more important than a gun. A discussion with a US citizen about how they thought the gun madness began was illuminating. It wasn’t, they said, a second amendment issue so much as a residual issue from the fighting when the country was split North and South. Everyone was armed against the “other”, and carrying guns has cultural roots in that experience. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I was fascinated by that idea. It still does not explain the use of military type repeating guns and the casual sale ideology.

I have noted the beginning of change though, not through legislation but through direct action which remains pathetic but maybe holds the seeds of change.

Even Walmart has decided that guns cannot be sold to anyone under 21. It does not address the issue of the Florida killer who was reported many times for his threats and behaviour. It seems these reports were not followed up on by authorities, which will hopefully bring that issue to the fore as well.

After President Trump told the country that he would have gone in to help without a gun (what a man), he is under incredible pressure to change things.

Large companies are separating themselves from support of the National Rife Association as they see that it may be affecting their business. And so it seems that there is change coming.

Hoorah, hoorah I say as I watched the footage of parents struck by grief in Florida. I looked at my grandchildren of the same age, and even in my overactive imagination could not comprehend such loss. After all of this though, my thoughts are always with the the children in Syria as well.

What is it in humans that turns people into machines that can slaughter anyone, least of all children? I am confused and ashamed to be part of a world that has been unable, or unwilling, to do more to protect its young.