I was at a doctor’s appointment five-plus years ago when I saw a push alert on my phone about a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

That, of course, was Sandy Hook, still the most awful of these regular occurrences. I went back to the office and wrote an editorial about the tragedy and predicted we’d have a national conversation about gun control.

The emails began to roll in about how I was a liberal hack. That’s not quite true, but it is true I am bad at predicting things. There was no real conversation about how to keep guns out of the hands of people who intend to do harm to a lot of people in a short amount of time, just like there wasn’t after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, or the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, or there won’t be after the killing of at least 17 people Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkman, Florida.

People who insist the ready access to guns is not a problem will say it’s a problem of mental health. Our president said the same thing Thursday.

Fine, then. So what are we going to do about mental health?

The same thing we’re going to do about guns: nothing.

Georgia ranks 47th per capita in the nation for spending on mental health care, according to Governing magazine, and there is no reason to expect that to change.

And of course within 24 hours of the shooting, we heard that all the signs of a potential problem in the life of suspected gunman Nikolas Cruz. In a comment on a YouTube video, Cruz supposedly said he would be a “professional school shooter” one day.

President Donald Trump said the signs were there, but it’s incumbent on people to step up and say something. (Heck, we now know the FBI was tipped off about Cruz last month but didn’t do anything.) Later, Trump promised to work with state and local officials to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” I hope he follows through on that, but I’m skeptical because the only thing that ever gets done for mental health care is to cut it.

Do you plan to call your state representative or your congressman and demand more funding for mental health care? Because if you do, know those dollars have to come from somewhere — either shifting resources from an existing program or getting them out of your pocket. And in the wake of a tax cut, I think we both know it’s not going to be the latter.

But just a day before Douglas High, I saw the superintendent of an Alabama school system taken to task for an online posting of surveillance photos from a man who entered a campus building during an extracurricular activity.

The man apparently had no ill intent, but these days you’d think you can’t be too careful — except people criticized the superintendent for making something out of nothing.

We can’t have it both ways: Either we say something when we see something, or we don’t and hope for the best.

I’m not here with the answers. But I am here, exasperated, at our lack of having done anything to solve the problem. Your opinion may differ from your neighbor’s when it comes to the root cause, but tackling either side would be better than nothing, right?

David Clemons is the editor and publisher of The Covington News. His email address is dclemons@covnews.com. Twitter: @scoopclemons.