December 14th will mark the the third anniversary of a mass shooting in Newtown that claimed the lives of 20 children and six staff members at the Sandy Hook elementary school.

There were tributes then, as there are this week, in the wake of yet another mass shooting in the United States. The 14 lives claimed in Wednesday's attack in San Bernardino make this shooting the deadliest since that tragedy in Connecticut three years ago, but the discourse and the reaction remains unchanged. 

For the President, he has had to stand up in front of a crowded press room and speak to the assembled media to talk about another event that lead to the death of a large number of American citizens: heading to the cinema, attending church, children going to school and students studying in college. 

With disturbing regularity, Obama has stated repeatedly that these mass shootings are becoming routine, and in the wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting in October of 2015, he delivered an emotional speech in which his anger and frustration at the lack of action on gun control were clear to see. 

In fact, a few short hours after an interview with the BBC in which he once again highlighted the alarming regularity of these types of incidents in July, he had to return to that same room and speak about another mass shooting at a Louisiana movie theater.

The FBI has stated that it is investigating the shooting as an "act of terrorism", but it was revealed that the guns used in San Bernardino were obtained legally, as are more than 80% of the weapons used in mass shootings. 

In addition to Wednesday's attack, three lives were claimed just last week in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but the reaction has been worryingly predictable from all corners. 

As pointed out by a social media campaign under the hashtag #thoughtsandprayers, the response is based around platitudes and statements that say the right thing about the sadness felt around the nation, but achieve very little. 

The campaign, launched by journalist Igor Volsky, quoted the slew of tweets sent out by members of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the wake of the shooting in California, alongside the individual politician's voting record, or the amount of money contributed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to their election campaign. 

While that campaign serves to highlight the inaction, it has largely been focused on the Republicans, which will in turn lead to a response from their party. That type of rhetoric turns in to political point scoring, something which distracts from the actual issue at hand. 

In the wake of the Planned Parenthood shooting, Cruz joined the choruses of people calling it a tragedy, but also stated that whenever an event like this happens, the media are "hoping desperately that the murderer is a Republican. But here's the simple and undeniable fact: the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are democrats" with little hard evidence to back up his claim. 

He further added that the shooter might have been a "transgendered leftist", as he looked to switch the focus from gun control while also stepping back from ties between himself and Troy Newman, a radical anti-abortion activist.

Neither, however, are Obama's litany of statements about the various killings making any headway in the fight to tighten gun control laws in Washington, despite the political wrangling he also mentions. His plea after the Sandy Hook tragedy to bring both sides "together to take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics" has fallen on deaf ears, as the gap between the two parties in the country continues to widen in the run up to the election next year. Neither party is moving towards the middle, as they look to build on the sides and push debate on the topics to polar extremes, making the possibility for compromise all the more remote. 

The run up to that campaign has seen the plethora of Republican candidates turn on the "left-wing" media, who they feel are twisting the story, as well as various attempts to shift the focus to some other issue when a mass shooting occurs, most commonly mental health. 

In the wake of the Paris attacks, 26 governors decided that they would take immediate action and move to stop the relocation of Syrian refugees to their state, while even more stated that they were in favour of increasingly stringent screening.

That action was swift, and there were no prayers or thoughts or statements of outrage needed from either side to get spur the politicians into action. There is only one common thing tying all of these shootings together: gun control. During Black Friday, over 185,000 people had their backgrounds checked in an attempt to buy a weapon, the highest level ever recorded in a single day. 

That worrying statistic shows that the trend is heading in the wrong direction when it comes to getting people to loosen their grip on their guns. While politicians pray, or think, or make a poignant statement, people are dying because of their inaction.

Whether it's a firearms accident that claims one life or a mass shooting that claims dozens, that inability to change people's attitudes towards gun control in a way that moves them to force their representatives to take some steps towards gun control means we continue to move one step closer to referring to this as "just another routine" mass shooting.