Amid carnage, will America even remember Parkland’s horror?

Even before police staged the first press briefing, you could have guessed the basic elements of the Valentine’s Day slaughter. You knew, because American mass murder has become such a benumbing banality. A series of gruesome cliches.

A disaffected killer, white male, possibly deranged, driven by inscrutable grievances.

An AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, the horribly efficient weapon of choice among American mass killers (See Aurora, Newtown, San Bernardino, Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas). And enough ammunition clips for a major killing spree. “Countless magazines,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters.

You could have written, in advance, the facile platitudes offered by the president, the governor and the political leadership of the party that controls both Congress and the Florida Legislature. Thoughts and prayers, they said. No mention of the relationship between an unfettered access to firearms and the gun violence that kills 96 Americans a day.

They insisted that the answer to Parkland’s tragedy wasn’t gun control but mental health treatment. Which sounds particularly disingenuous coming from the mouths of Florida’s political leaders who’ve presided over a state ranked dead last in mental health funding.

As usual, our pols lectured those who might suggest expanding background checks on firearm purchases or limiting access to assault weapons or high capacity magazines. “Now is not the time” for such talk. It’s disrespectful, even shameful, to talk gun control “so soon after this tragedy.”

Give America time to grieve, they demand. Later, somewhere off in an amorphous future, “we can have a deeper conversation about why these things happen,” as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told Fox News Wednesday. (In October, the New York Times reported that the NRA had rewarded Rubio’s procrastination with $3.3 million toward his political endeavors.)

Trouble is, America has suffered from so many mass murders and school shootings so often that we’re stuck in a perpetual state of mourning. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings (incidents with four or more victims, not including the shooter) has counted 30 so far in 2018. The New York Times reported that since a deranged gunman with an AR-15 (of course) massacred 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, America has suffered 272 school shootings, with 439 wounded, 121 killed.

It’s always “too soon” in America to talk about the kind of gun violence that left 17 dead and 15 wounded in Parkland on Wednesday.

As usual, social media erupted with lunatic speculation after the shooting. The online mob quickly identified the Parkland killer with a string of different names and photos of dissimilar men.

From the far fringe of the Internet (but not far enough) “truthers” — the same gang that delights in harassing the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook — were claiming that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School incident was just another government hoax. A false flag.

InfoWars, the president’s favorite conspiracy monger, the website that helped propagate the Pizzagate lie, claimed that the Parkland gunman was an ISIS supporter who dressed in communist garb. And that government authorities, abetted by the mainstream media, had covered up evidence of a second shooter. Nothing surprising there. The mind numbing predictability that follows such tragedies would have been outrageous, unless your reservoir of outrage and anguish had been depleted by Las Vegas (58 dead), Orlando (49), Blacksburg (32), Newtown (27), Sutherland Springs (25 plus an unborn child). Or Austin (18), San Bernardino (14), Fort Hood (13), the Washington Navy Yard (12), Aurora (12), Columbine (13).

Who would even remember the killings at Killeen, Texas, 1991, (23) except that the innocents were shot in a Luby’s Cafeteria. Which might remind someone of the carnage at San Ysidro, California, 1984, (21) when a gunman went berserk in a McDonald’s hamburger joint.

Memories of other mass murders begin to run together, like watercolors left in the rain. Just some vague notions of a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma (14), or the Wah Mee social club in Seattle, an immigrant center in Binghamton, N.Y., a cross-town rampage in WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania (13 and 13 and 13), a brokerage house in Atlanta (12).

Sure, memories of the brutal, racist murders (9) committed by a neo-Confederate idiot who invaded an historic black church in Charleston won’t go away. What happened to those aging churchgoers, gathered for Bible study, demands a special category of horror. Like the murders of tiny elementary children at Sandy Hook.

And a special infamy also ought to be associated with the Valentine’s Day horrors that unfolded Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But outside South Florida, I’m not so sure Americans will attach long term significance to the lives lost in Parkland.

Not in a nation that’s grown inured to gun violence and school shootings and terrifying body counts and videos of children, single file, hands on the shoulders of the students in front, hurriedly escorted from active crime scenes.

Not in a country where citizens can absorb news about the latest school massacre, say that’s terrible, then switch the channel to Olympic figure skating.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail .com) has worked as a reporter or columnist in South Florida since 1976.