Americans have massacres down to a fine art now. Round the clock coverage with brutal back to back eyewitness testimonies. Rapid-fire branding of perpetrators with throwaway insults like ‘coward’. Hollow promises made by local authorities that they absolutely positively won’t let this atrocity change us.

Ask anyone who’s felt anxious in the middle of a packed cinema, been in the vicinity of a backfiring car, or—in my case this afternoon —within earshot of a dropped chess set on a tiled bar floor, everybody in America is already well and truly changed.