This past week more than a dozen pipe bombs were mailed to Democratic leaders, including an ex-president and an ex-vice-president, several members of Congress and various others who had been critical of Trump.

Yesterday, a man walked into a synagogue during services and gunned down 11 worshipers.

It would be helpful if we could be more than shocked at these things, if we could be surprised that such a thing could happen in the United States. It would be better if we could say, as the people interviewed on television in front of crime scenes at a residence, that you’d never expect something like this to happen in such a quiet country.

But we can’t say that. This has become our existence.

Trump said that it would have probably been better if there had been an armed guard inside the synagogue, that he might have been able to kill the shooter before he killed 11 others. Perhaps, or perhaps there would be one more dead, this one with a gun in his hand or holster.

This is the sadness we have become. A world where we have to have an armed guard to prevent a slaughter while we have a ceremony to name a baby. Where the answer to death by gunfire is more gunfire and probably more death.

This country has never been a particularly peaceful place for all of its citizens. In the years between the end of the Civil War and the middle of the last century, about 4,000 blacks were lynched in the formerly Confederate states.  About 1,000 were killed in labor disputes. Since the 1920s, more than 50 black churches were burned, bombed, or vandalized. Thee were more than 6,000 reported hate crimes last year against blacks, Muslims, and LGBT people. (Note that these are reported hate crimes. 92 large cities didn’t report any at all.)

We have traditionally found groups who, in the minds of some of our citizens, should be targets rather than neighbors.

But now it’s different. Even when I was young, and the south had institutionalized its racism through Jim Crow laws, violence was not so commonplace. Nor was there the perceived need to protect our schools and churches with armed guards. Nobody marched in the streets with long guns to intimidate their neighbors.

It appears that we’ve given up to violence and senseless death as the new normal. We do not have the unity, the will, nor the leadership to make our country safe. Instead, we say that we need more guns to protect us from the guns, and I suppose it follows that we need better bombs to protect us from the bombers.

Trump said that shootings such as the one that happened yesterday are happening here and “around the world.” That may be a fact, but it’s not a truth. We seem to be the champions in the sport of killing our citizens because we don’t like them. We average more than one mass shooting a day in this country. For comparison purposes I found a web site that purported to list all of the mass shootings in Europe in 2016 : 34 shootings and more than half of those were in Russia and the Ukraine.

I remember a dystopian movie from years ago where the hero was walking down a badly lit street, looking over his shoulder, wondering where the danger was coming from. The street was empty, but he was certain he was being watched by someone who would do him harm.

That’s the way I feel today.

This is the sadness we have become.