I was sitting in my apartment in East Harlem, New York, when it first hit the news.

I think I saw something on Twitter first. Then I turned on cable TV and waited to hear from a police officer or a politician or someone with some authority.

There was so much confusion in those first couple of hours. There always is. Everyone hangs on every thread of information but it always takes an age to work out the detail.

Everyone in New Zealand was asleep but eventually I just took a punt, hired a car from the Avis down the road, packed my camera gear and started driving north out of Manhattan, through the Bronx, and up across the state border into Connecticut. I was listening to a press conference on the radio when they finally confirmed the fatalities.

Ten years ago this December. Sandy Hook.

There’s not really anything to say about mass shootings in America that hasn’t been said. But I always feel a bit of a macabre connection to American massacres, because I ended up covering so many in the five years I lived in the States. I remember when Aurora happened. I remember when San Bernardino happened. I remember when Charleston happened. I flew across the country and drove through the night to be at Umpqua Community College. Most people don’t remember that one – eight people died. I was on the scene just a few hours after the Pulse nightclub shooting went down. That held the record for fatalities, at the time.

I still think of Sandy Hook the most. The lonely drive up there. The satellite trucks. The families gathering in the firehouse to collect their children and the slow realisation that those parents who were left would forever be bound to the worst of the worst. The memorials that popped up over the next few days. The quietness. The way no one liked making eye contact in the street. Twenty little kids.

My girlfriend feels like she has to breathe it all in. She reads every article and watches every press conference. She wants to see the children’s faces and hear their parents wailing. I found her the other day, unblinking, tears gliding down her cheeks as she watched Anderson Cooper interviewing a Dad whose daughter had been shot in the head. She feels compelled to try understand the incomprehensible and in her search for answers, she learns Every. Single. Detail.

But I cant anymore. I makes me feel funny to engage with the shootings. I don’t want to know details or learn anyone’s name. I just feel a massive darkness about the whole process, the whole routine and theatre of it all.

At the time, Sandy Hook felt like the best chance for something big to change. Obama cried on TV. I was there when he turned up at the vigil in Newtown to meet with all the families and promised to go above and beyond. Maybe this is it, we thought. After all, it doesn’t get any worse. Can you imagine any greater horror than a gunman in a primary school? Five and six-year-old kids.

Nothing big changed, of course. There is perhaps no greater illustration of just how poisoned the American political system has become than the fact that a minority interest in assault weapons can ward off greater regulation, even when a majority of Americans favour it and massacres have become the norm.

We live in a strange World in which an NBA coach or a group of protesting students might be more effective in affecting change than the post powerful officials in their country.

And so I hope I’m wrong. I hope the pendulum of change swings back the other way and that instead of waiting for a horror even more shocking than Sandy Hook or Uvalde, the sheer weight of all these tragedies is enough.

But if recent history is any guide, there will be another horror. Another kid with an AR-15. Another worst nightmare. Another Uvalde. Another Sandy Hook.