"There's been another big shooting back home," I called to my wife while watching CNN. "It's happening right now." At the time, 12 people were reported as wounded. "At a school?" she said with alarm.

To be an American living overseas – no, make that an American anywhere – is to feel some measure of relief when you realize the latest mass murder could have been worse. It's not that we've become numb, just not so easily shocked. In the end, 12 people were killed and others wounded by a 34-year-old Navy veteran who worked for a government contractor and, we're told, had practiced Buddhism for a time, evidently trying to cope with his anger issues. Somehow he got a gun inside a Navy Yard in Washington D.C., with supposedly tight security, and started killing people. He ended up dead himself in a gun battle with police.

But look on the bright side: At least the victims were adults, not first-graders and teachers, like they were in the last great American bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That horror should have inspired tougher gun laws but didn't, thanks to the shameful way Congress – most of it – kowtows to the mighty gun lobby.

"Seriously, I think we're safer living overseas," my wife declared. Safer from the National Rifle Association and flying bullets, certainly. 

Only in America, with its permissive gun laws, are mass shootings entirely predictable, likely to occur every few months, if not weeks. Crime, on the whole, has trended downward in the U.S., but the mass killings – defined by the FBI as four or more victims, not including the perpetrator – are up, up, up. 

As it happened, Europe was shocked this week by a mass shooting in Austria, with four deaths. Such incidents are rare in nations with sane gun laws. But back in the USA, the data is deep and deeply disturbing: more than 221 mass killings since the start of 2006, including 168 involving guns, according to USA Today. (Other victims were claimed by arson, stabbings, poison and blunt force, including pedestrians who happened to get in the way of lethally bad motorists.) 

The magazine Atlantic helpfully crunched the probabilities based on the 67 mass shootings since President Obama took office and, with no hint of satire, made this forecast: "The next mass shooting will take place on February 12, 2014 in Spokane, Washington. It will be committed by an emotionally disturbed, 38 year-old white man who will kill seven people and wound six more at a place he used to work using a semi-automatic handgun he purchased legally in the state."

Putting aside the details, the point is that something like this is very likely to happen. The Atlantic noted that the death toll was, "sadly, . . . the easiest figure to develop. At the incidents we focused on, an average of 7.6 people were killed and 6.5 injured. The 67 incidents have seen over a thousand people killed or wounded."

The magazine added: "Our sincere hope is that every prediction we made is wrong because no mass killings should happen again. The probability of that happening is not statistically significant."

Now, each of the actual events is uniquely tragic, but some are more mystifying, more galling and more terrifying than others. Most Americans, I suspect, have developed a sensibility about such front-page crime that considers not just quantity of the carnage, but other pertinent qualities. And at the risk of seeming callous, let me explain why I'd rank the Navy Yard shooting as a second-tier rampage.

For starters, it simply doesn't shock the way some others do. The visceral reaction to the news pales against the horrors that most Americans can recall with one name: Sandy Hook. Aurora. Columbine. Some of us are old enough to remember the horror of McDonald's massacre in San Ysidro, California on July 18, 1984. A man who had told his wife "society had its chance" and that he was planning to "hunt humans," using three guns to shoot to death 21 people and wounded 19 others in a span of 77 minutes before a police marksman killed him.

Off the top of my head, I could think of five or six American mass murders in recent years that, to me, are more shocking than the Navy Yard incident, even if the body count may not be as high. (When I googled the topic, I realized that I had temporarily blocked out America's deadliest in recent years: the massacre of 32 students and staff by a madman at Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007.)

The fact that the Navy Yard shooting happened in Washington D.C., a hub of media and politics, will garner it more attention than if a similar incident had happened in a naval base elsewhere. Certainly workplace shootings are more random and thus scarier than family murders, another large category of America's gun mayhem. But more terrifying still is the prospect of a madman (almost always a man) who opens fire in public spaces like cinemas, shopping centers or beauty salons. The typical workplace rampage is also less galling than those that occur at places thought to be sanctuaries, such as schools and places of worship.

Or McDonald's, for that matter. Vietnam now has one of its own in Ho Chi Minh City – and the prospect of such massacres here are all but unthinkable, right? In America, sadly, we can't help but think about it.