Another nine lives taken. Another community left in grief. Another disturbing manifesto released. Another father weeping for his young daughter, and another mother counting her blessings that it wasn’t her child.

Another week of outcry, of anguish, of national mourning. Another tweet posted to social media by a politician offering his “sincerest thoughts and prayers to those affected.” Another impassioned call for gun control legislation that will never pass.

Another life cut short by a merciless system that only cares when it’s convenient.

In a few weeks, the tragedy in Oregon will be reduced to a mere statistic. “In 2015, there have been forty school shootings and counting,” you’ll hear on CNN. And eventually, we’ll forget, too. We’ll move on. We’ll push the unsettling media coverage and the stories of the victims’ lives out of our consciousness for the sake of sheer self-preservation.

Until it happens again.

We can say that we care. We can retweet that politician’s message of condolences and feel confident that our civic duty has been fulfilled. But praying and tweeting and merely thinking will not bring back the 87,416 people killed by gun violence since Sandy Hook. Or the 8,512 people killed in 2015 so far.

If 8,512 Americans were killed by guns in a foreign country, we would denounce such violence as an act of terrorism. We would send our troops and tanks and demand accountability (and probably start another unnecessary war in the process).

Since 2001, the United States military-industrial complex has contributed a whopping $1 trillion and counting to fighting wars overseas. Taxpayers, shockingly, still pay $8.36 million per hour to fund these campaigns. Meanwhile, only 24 U.S. citizens were killed by overseas terrorists in 2014.

Does this reflect the political class’s inherent affinity for optics, or something more? What does it say about the American people, who, after major shootings, repeatedly express more support for gun rights even when it’s been proven that areas with more guns have higher homicide rates? What does it say about a country whose leaders hold the “Second Amendment more sacred than spilled blood”?

Human life should not be a partisan issue. And unless we stop making it one, on both sides of the aisle, this disturbing trend will slowly become the expected, and accepted, norm. And then we won’t even pretend to care.