Another school shooting.

Another group of high school teenagers, scarred forever.

Another round of asking “why” and never receiving acceptable answers.

In Parkland, Fla., a psychopath opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed young teenagers who had their whole lives in front of them.

He killed teachers who were educating young people, preparing them for college and the opportunity to raise a family and experience life.

There’s no reason for this vile person’s actions that will ever make sense to the world.

Watching teenagers file out of a school, their trembling hands on the shoulders of the student in front of them, running while armed police officers and S.W.A.T. teams with loaded rifles and guns, directing them to a safe spot, is a sight that’s becoming common place in American schools.

The scenes brought back memories of the Columbine High School shootings. I was home that day and watched with horror as teenagers fled for their lives against the two monsters that opened fire in their school.

There were strange kids in my high school class, and I grew up in a blue-collar city where people went hunting all the time. Almost every family had guns in their homes, and they were readily available to them.

Nobody ever brought a gun to school and opened fire on their classmates.

Something has changed in the past 20 years where deranged young people went from dreaming up a nightmare scenario to actually carrying it out.

Is it violence in video games? I’ve seen some of those first-person shooter games, and they’re gruesome. The player hunts down other players and shoots them, the blood flying everywhere on the screen.

Have these games anesthetized our young people to the damage a gun does to a human being? Is there no clue about the permanence of death and the scars they’ve inflicted on the school, the families, the town, the nation?

Do we blame social media? Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat remove the personal from conversations and interactions with each other. Cyberbullying is rampant, and when people make mean comments, we pay scant attention.

The next time you read a story online, scroll down and read the comments. You’ll be appalled at the filth people post anonymously. Their political and angry agendas are there for the world to see, and we just let it pass, citing freedom of speech.

So what’s the answer? Do we take away guns? Do we limit social media? Do we make every comment posted online transparent?

What about teens we suspect could be dangerous – are we unfairly labeling them if we report them to the school authorities as a possible unsafe person?

We’ll raise the same questions – how did he get the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, what pushed him over the edge, what was his home life like, was he bullied.

The bottom line is this psychopath, this brutal murderer, made the choice to take a loaded weapon to a high school of innocent people and open fire.

He changed the lives of every person in that school, from the principal to the custodian to every teacher and every single student.

He altered the lives of the families of the students in that school, and he shattered the fragile illusion we had that our children are safe.

This violence has to stop.

We have to take a hard look at our young people, figure out why they’re so angry and address the problem instead of burying our faces in our cellphones.

America, it’s time to wake up.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.