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Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018.

On Wednesday afternoon, a gunman carrying a semi-automatic rifle killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla. For Americans, it was a familiar sense of horror.

The shooting now occupies a place in a grim tally. It is one of the ten most deadly mass shootings in modern American history. Three of those shootings have taken place in the last five months.

The violence in Florida was also the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 attack on an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. which killed 26 people, most of them first-graders.

Faced with yet another shooting – and the prospect of continued inaction by lawmakers – Americans expressed their shame and anger.

Philip Mudd, a former agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, began to weep on CNN as he discussed the shooting.

John Weaver, a Republican strategist, raged in a series of tweets against the National Rifle Association and politicians who "skate through mass murder."

Bess Kalb, a television writer in Los Angeles, began tweeting how much money certain politicians expressing sympathy had received from the NRA in the last election cycle.

Nelba Marquez-Greene, the mother of one of the children killed in Newtown, also took to Twitter to express her horror and shame to Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

Rosanne Cash, a musician, wrote about how unbearable it was to see these scenes repeated.