On February 14, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was marked as America’s most lethal school shooting, with 17 fatalities. Conversation of the event has created connections to a tendency for tragic events to turn abstract in the human mind called “psychic numbing.”

In a recent story on Vox Media, University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic was interviewed sharing results of an study he had conducted. Several subjects were asked a simple question: Would they rather donate to aid an environmental crisis impacting an entire country, or to a single child dying of a terminal illness. In this study, every participant said that they would donate to the child.

Junior Isabel Christie finds that as a society, Americans focus on each major tragic event until another becomes more relevant.

“I would probably donate to a single child… It sounds horrible to say that, but also it’s because we’re more personally connected, because then we’re like ‘Oh I helped save that one person,’ and we don’t know who we’re helping if we help a huge group of people,” Christie said.

Bowie’s psychology teacher Phillip Perry believes students and faculty are falling victim to psychic numbing, specifically for school shootings within our country.

“If we don’t see it directly affecting our lives, then we’re not really going to pay attention to it,” Perry said. “The more we experience of one unchanging thing, our bodies begin to ignore it. Our minds are doing the same thing, we hear about the same stuff and now we’ve begun to really tune it out.”

Junior Noelle Hall thinks change needs to be made to prevent cycles of mass shootings, even if those changes follow trial and error patterns.

“It’s just a cycle. Mass shooting happens, people talk about it and give their prayers and condolences and they feel bad about it,” Hall said. “They stop talking about it, and there’s a moment of silence until another mass shooting happens.”

The first major school shooting was the Columbine High School massacre, resulting in 15 deaths total. The shooting was premeditated, and both shooters involved committed suicide. These two facts of Columbine led to a tendency that has been present in every single school shooting subsequently, save for Stoneman, where the shooter was apprehended before death. The Columbine massacre occured in 1999, and nearly 19 years later, the Stoneman shooting takes place. Perry, who was in college at the time, recalls Columbine, and recognizes the difference in emotion over time.

“It was one of those things that didn’t seem fathomable, but now I see it… and it just rolls off your back now, and it shouldn’t. It’s unfortunate,” Perry said.