About a month ago, a woman having a mental health episode was shot dead by the police in the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey. About a week ago, schools in South Jersey were closed after shooting threats there. Before that, a shooting at a New Jersey football game caused a stir. Then a dirt bike theft and shooting incident in Dennis, New Jersey caused school cancellations. Two days ago, a burglary suspect was non-fatally shot by the police in Rumson, New Jersey. Around the same time, perhaps for comic relief, a New Jersey police officer shot himself in the leg during a drill at a shooting range in Passaic County. Back on August 9, a Jersey City activist was shot in the leg by the Israel Defense Forces in Beita, in the West Bank. To cap it off, almost exactly a month later, another American activist was shot dead by the same Israel Defense Forces in the same place. She was buried yesterday.

Remember the national outrage over these tragic, terrible shooting incidents? Yeah, neither do I. There’s nothing to remember, because there wasn’t any. And except for the very last case, I’ve just focused on Jersey examples that I could dredge up from a five minute search on Google News. Maybe a whimper here, and a profanity there, but nothing beyond that. This is America. No one gives a shit about shootings any more–at least shootings of people not running for president. And how could they? Shootings are, as J.D. Vance puts it, a fact of life. You can’t feel outrage over the ubiquitous and inevitable.

Sometime today, while I was slaving away at the office, some crazed partisan of the Ukraine War tried, or half-tried, or kinda wanted to try, to shoot Donald Trump. He didn’t succeed, alas. A couple of years ago, I’d contemplated writing a blog post on poetic justice. Well, I no longer have to, since this assassination attempt is the closest approximation to poetic justice we’re likely to see anytime soon: war-addled lunatic makes assassination attempt on crime-addled fascist. Not bad. With any luck, these successive approximations to poetic justice will some day cease to be mere approximations, and finally reach teleological consummation. Bring me my arrows of desire.

Meanwhile, what’s the message of our hand-wringing ruling class? Here is “security expert” Juliette Kayyem of Harvard’s ironically-named Kennedy School of Government:

Trump should be outraged; all Americans should be. No former president or current presidential candidate should be so vulnerable during both public and private events. And the choices facing voters should not be left to the whim of gunmen.

Come on, lady. The “whim of gunmen”? What planet are you on? The choices facing voters just are the “whims of gunmen.” Or gunpersons, if you will. Every mainstream political candidate is running on a pro-war platform of some kind–a reckless, murderous platform based on half-assed, unargued dogmas about our enemies, and our security, and our alliances, and the imperatives of world leadership, and the entire shit-eating cavalcade of clichès that our “commanders-in chief” haul out whenever they want us to help them slaughter a bunch of foreigners. We just watched a presidential debate in which the two candidates vied for the title of Most Lethal of Them All. If that isn’t the “whim of gunmen,” what the hell is? And if it isn’t the whim of gunmen, what the hell is it?

If we aren’t supposed to be “outraged” when hundreds of thousands of people get shot up, or blown up, or burned to death with weapons we manufacture, fund, and supply, how does anyone expect us to muster outrage when the biggest asshole in the country ends up on the receiving end of notional violence on a Florida golf course?

And obviously, we aren’t supposed to be outraged about ordinary deaths. If we were, the hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine and Palestine would mean something. They obviously don’t. If they did, we would long ago have stopped adding to the body bags. Does it look like we have? Our ruling class is all in favor of mass death on battlefields abroad and relatively indifferent to the slow trickle of death at home, but gets “outraged”–outraged–when someone, including one of their own, decides to turn the violence back on the people responsible for it. Well, sorry to put it this way, but maybe that’s where it belongs.

It’s way too late to get me to care about Donald Trump’s life. My advice? Save your outrage for someone who actually matters. And spend your time figuring out who does.