Violence grabs attention the more graphic and awful and unthinkable it is.

The Uvalde, Texas, shooting that left 19 kids ages 9 to 10 and two teachers dead at Robb Elementary and injured at least 17 others is the most glaring and timely example. It is the most recent terrible link in a terrible chain.

But this chain is more like the pattern of a rosary — the big beads of Sandy Hook and Las Vegas and Squirrel Hill separated by the smaller beads of the outbursts that are just as awful but with lower body counts like the California church, the Houston flea market and the South Carolina bistro that were all hit between the Buffalo grocery store on May 14 and Uvalde on May 24.

The East Allegheny Airbnb shooting on Easter Sunday that left two boys dead and others injured was one of those small spikes on the violence radar.

What links them all, however, are the routine, everyday kind of atrocities that should not become the background noise they are.

Like the death of 18-month-old De’Avry Thomas.

There should be no reason that a baby in a car with his mother in Downtown Pittsburgh, just a skip from the mirrored glass spires of PPG Place, should be mowed down by drive-by gunfire. No reason at all. But it happened on Sunday, once again shattering a holiday weekend into bloody, violent pieces.

And the most gut-wrenching thing of all is that it won’t stop.

De’Avry’s loss won’t be the last anymore than Uvalde survivor Miah Cerrillo, 11, will be the last child covered in the blood of her classmates in a school shooting. De’Avry’s mother will not be the last parent to grieve a loss that should never have happened. De’Avry’s family will not be the last to wonder why nothing changes.

Nothing changes because it is easier to point fingers than to find answers. It is easier to blame someone else than to think about what each of us could do to make a difference. It is somehow comforting to everyone to say that it is that person or that party or that company or any of a million things that aren’t us that needs to change.

Contrary to the shouts of both sides, there is no one answer to the open, gaping wound that is violence. Just like the chain of events that strings these incidents across time and distance, there will need to be a chain of many stitches to close that wound.

It will involve law enforcement and social work, health care and mental health, economics and culture, government and grassroots. It will involve everyone.

And until everyone realizes that, it is only a matter of time — very little time — until there is another Uvalde and another De’Avry.

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