It could have been any of us. We’re all victims of the same violent act, every day, everywhere.

The inescapable feeling reading the accounts of these Hedingham neighbors whose lives were torn apart, their streets defiled by a 15-year-old with a gun, is that there was nothing special or different about them. They were just going about their business until some of their lives were ended by gunfire and the rest of them were irrevocably changed.

It could have been any of us.

This is all of us.

We’re almost numb to it now, the way we live with the threat of gun violence in our schools, at our celebrations, among our neighborhoods. A generation of kids has been raised to live in the legitimate fear that someone may enter their defenseless classroom with a killing machine in his — almost always, always, his — hand. The rest of us scan exits, navigate festival crowds, move through stores with the thought occasionally flitting through our minds … where would I go if … what can I do when.

We all just live with it now, every day, not just days like Thursday.

It’s no way to live.

Almost 11 years ago, there was a wave of muggings and assaults on the American Tobacco Trail in Durham. I was one of the victims. Two kids — and I would eventually learn, through their trials, that they were really just 15-year-old kids — ran up behind me while I was out jogging on a sunny December day and bashed me over the head with the bottoms of 40-ounce beer bottles. I had seen them cross the trail in front of me. I never heard them circle back and approach.

I stumbled after the first strike, crumpled to the pavement after the second, maybe lost consciousness briefly, maybe not, but the next thing I remember saw them standing over me, bottles poised to strike again, demanding money I didn’t have. They left me there then, and when I eventually stood up, the blood that had pooled in my hat poured down my face.

A chilling thought strikes me now: In 2022, they’d be more likely to have handguns.

The physical damage healed quickly enough, the concussion more slowly. My hair grew back over where the staples had been and it was no thinner than before. But even as I avoided that spot, less than a mile from where I lived at the time, the threat lurked in my mind as I unlocked my car or opened my front door, always turning to check behind.

It took two years and, eventually, cognitive-behavioral therapy, to stop the panic attacks and be able to run outside again. And I do, now, again, on trails not unlike the Neuse River Greenway Trail, where some of the violence happened Thursday.

How many people out running or walking or riding their bikes or walking their dogs this morning on trails and greenways across the Triangle were looking around, wondering what they’d do if someone stepped onto the trail with a gun? How many left their homes and scanned their familiar streets with new suspicion?

Where I was then, in the wake of that attack, is where we all are today, both before and after Hedingham, wondering if today’s the day we’ll have to run for our lives.

What I wrote earlier is wrong. We’re not numb. We’re in a state of perpetual alertness, and whether we realize it or not, our brains are constantly processing fight-or-flight on a quiet, draining subroutine. There are so many mass shootings, we’re all touched eventually. I have two degrees of separation from four of the most notorious: Columbine, Annapolis, Las Vegas, Highland Park. I know someone who knows someone who was killed by a mass shooter.

How many other Americans today have two degrees of separation from a mass shooting? How many are one degree removed? After Thursday night, here, more.

So we’ll go on living like this, fleeing the mall in a panicked stampede because someone knocked over a chair in the food court and it’s not worth the risk anymore that it might not be a gunshot, because it became clear after Sandy Hook — those tiny little kids and that great big assault rifle — that we lacked the collective wherewithal to do anything about it the way every other country has.

We’re all living like we’ve been attacked from behind. We’re all victims of a violent act, every day, every one of us.