This is an opinion column.

Before Sunday morning, most folks in this country had never heard of Dadeville, Ala., a small town between Birmingham and Auburn.

Then suddenly, everybody heard of Dadeville at the same time.

The details were sparse at first.

Another mass shooting.

This time at a birthday party.

Four were dead.

More than 20 injured.

And then, that’s pretty much all there was from law enforcement.

State and local police didn’t say whether they had a suspect in custody or if they even had a suspect. Was there a shooter on the loose? Or shooters? Three days later and the police still haven’t said.

The lack of detail has made this tragedy frustrating but also all the more captivating for that initial national audience.

Now, thanks mostly to interviews with survivors, we know a little more.

This shooting wasn’t the Uvalde sort of thing — where one unhinged, aggrieved lone wolf went on a murder spree at a school. Rather, it falls into a bucket some will code as “street violence” that too many folks have decided doesn’t merit their concern.

Perhaps mercifully, this shooting did not involve the sort of combat rifle that gun control advocates want to ban, so it doesn’t fit into that bucket of tragedies, either.

And you can start timing how long it will take for that wider fascination to fade. Because the character and the context of how these young people died will diminish public attention quickly.

From: ‘How could such a thing happen?’

To: ‘Meh, this sort of thing happens all the time, right?’

Indeed it does. So much so, that such killings fail to captivate or hold national attention, despite there being so many.

It’s so common that, right here in Alabama, we’ve had similar shootings at birthday parties before, only few folks took notice because the details emerged quickly and the death counts weren’t as high.

As soon as it became clear most of the victims were young Black people, a lot of folks had begun to tune out already.

But to the family of those killed, their sons and daughters meant as much to them.

The futures lost and survivors scarred are no less significant.

And we should care precisely because this sort of thing does happen all the time.

Our curiosity has already told on us — we seem to think that some deaths matter more than others.

As you’ve likely heard it said already, gun violence has become the leading cause of death among children.

It was already the leading cause of childhood death by 2020 and since then those death rates have more than doubled.

Related: Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among Alabama children

When an affliction of our own creation has surpassed childhood diseases, that should have mattered enough to spur action, but that happened a while back and we barely noticed.

Because most of it isn’t mass shootings at a school like we saw in Nashville.

It’s gun violence, of all kinds, and the availability of weapons by young people and those around them.

It’s suicide by teenagers who don’t see the light at the end of their tunnels.

It’s small children who don’t know what they found in their parents’ nightstand isn’t a toy.

It’s juvenile grudges that once would have been settled with fistfights now escalating to mass murder.

It’s drunk abusive parents.

It’s an innocent teen knocking on the wrong door or a young woman turning down the wrong driveway.

And Sunday it was Dadeville.

Gun violence takes many forms.

Don’t look away because the details in this shooting failed to fit your first impressions. You might accidentally be looking in the right place.

Because when we dismiss a shooting as something that wouldn’t happen to us — whoever us is — we guarantee that it will happen again.

Don’t look away this time.

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