Falkenberg: It’s chilling but not shocking.

Screams. Pools of blood in the art room. The fetid potpourri of gunsmoke and fear.

As I read witness descriptions of the scene at Santa Fe High School on Friday, I felt a chill, but not a shock. I felt sadness, but not disbelief. I felt at a loss, but not for words. No, we have the words. We have practiced them countless times. We mumble the vocabulary of a massacre like a sacred yet passionless ritual: Horror. Grief. Thoughts. Prayers. For some of us, the greatest horror we feel is our utter lack of it. Even the chil- dren seem unfazed. In a TV interview shared nearly 2 million times online, a young girl with long brown hair and shy, downcast eyes explained to a reporter how she kept calm during the school shooting that killed 10 people.

When a reporter asked if, at some point, she thought, “This isn’t real. This wouldn’t happen at my school,” she shook her head and managed a slight smile of awkward resignation.

“It’s happening everywhere,” she said. “I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

Let those words settle like an anvil.

The assumption of safety we innocents felt after the Columbine massacre in 1999 is no more. Some children are not asking “how” or “why.” They are waiting for “when.”

Their psyches don’t struggle to comprehend. They simply accept the morbid reality of the day: It’s my turn.

Since Columbine, 214,000 children at 216 schools have experienced gun violence during school hours, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper’s investigation sought to measure the number of children, beyond the dead and wounded, whose experiences may have them profoundly affected and

even traumatized.

The newspaper has found that at least 141 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 284 have been injured. In 2018 alone, there already have been 16 shootings — the highest number at this point during any year since 1999.

Just as we know the ritual that directly follows the shootings, we know what follows soon after. A boost in gun sales. Fear-mongering by the National Rifle Association. Scapegoating of the mentally ill. A vicious war of words and gun statistics on social media. Lipservice from politicians who promise to stop this kind of tragedy from ever happening again.

It ends, as it always does, with entrenched resistance to common sense.

It ends with good reforms — restricting sales of militarystyle assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, more effective gun storage requirements, stronger background checks — dismissed as attacks on the Second Amendment.

As if the forefathers intended deranged teenagers to have access to weapons of war at the corner gun shop, enabling them to maximize the body count in the school art room.

If nothing else jolts you today about this blood-stained scene cloaked in the numbing taupe of normalcy, let it be this:

It was Santa Fe’s turn today. Soon, it will be someone else’s. None of us wants to imagine our own face, or that of our child, frozen in pain in some news photographer’s frame.

At the same time, none of us wants evacuation drills and metal detectors to become rites of passage. Many of us believe that greater vigilance around issues of mental health, bullying and social isolation are important components to preventing school shootings.

But without common-sense gun reform, no politician can promise this tragedy won’t happen again. Indeed, without reform, the only promise is that it will.