We hear a lot about mass shootings. And for good reason: They’re horrific.

But while every death is tragic, we’re fortunate that there were not more than 705 of our fellow citizens killed last year by sociopathic assailants in mass shootings, the latter having no official definition, but considered to be “four or more shot (injured or killed) in a single incident, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.”

The dead in these cases tend to be young, black, male, and anonymous to all but their friends and families – and predominately murdered by other young, black, males. But on rare occasions, when a mass shooting takes place in a school or a church or a synagogue or a grocery store, we get to learn something about the victims. Something about their hopes and dreams. And we remember — at least for a moment — that these were real people rather than statistics.

Now consider a plague far more deadly than these mass shootings; a plague that last year took not 705 souls but nearly 108,000. That’s how many of our fellow citizens died last year from drug overdoses. We never see their faces nor hear their names. Ever. Unless the deceased is a celebrity. And where the math of 705 mass shooting deaths in a country of 330 million works out to roughly one death per year for every 470,000 Americans, the number of overdose deaths works out to roughly one per year for every 3,000 Americans. Put another way, that’s more than 150 overdose deaths for every one mass shooting death.

These are grim numbers, all of them, and they make us wonder: Instead of calling for red flag laws and further gun restrictions, why isn’t Joe Biden beating the drum about the drug trade? Why isn’t he acknowledging the far more awful toll being taken by fentanyl and other drugs? Why hasn’t he declared war on the drug cartels that continue to poison the American people?

The answer is obvious: because doing something about the flow of deadly narcotics into our country would require Joe Biden to close its main avenue of entry — our southern border. And that’s simply not part of the Democrats’ plan.

Nor, it seems, is enforcing the laws when doing so could help keep the drugs off our streets.

Take the case of Jose Zendejas, 25, and Benito Madrigal, 19, who were arrested last Friday during a traffic stop in Tulare County, California, just southeast of Fresno. This was no minor bust, though. These two traffickers had 150 packages with 1,000 fentanyl pills in each — enough to potentially kill several million people. So they were rightly charged with possession, transportation, and selling of illegal drugs — and promptly released on their own recognizance the very next day by Tulare County Court Commissioner Mikki Verissimo, after which they promptly failed to show up for their arraignment.

What a stunner. Don’t these gentlemen have any respect for our criminal justice system?

Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward and Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux blamed the release on an ill-conceived public safety assessment. “How does this happen without the top two law enforcement officers of the county not even know it?” asked Ward. “That’s incredibly frustrating for someone who’s responsible for public safety,” said Boudreaux.

We’ll say. But we’ve come to expect this from the late great state of California.

No one, though, could’ve expected what happened in Gadsden County, Florida, this past weekend. As ABC News reports, “A small, largely rural county west of Florida’s capital experienced an unheard-of spike in deadly drug overdoses believed to be caused by fentanyl over the July 4 weekend, with nine people dying in the latest sign that a national crisis is becoming even more far-reaching.”

In addition to the nine deaths, another nine people were treated there for suspected fentanyl overdoses.

As our Nate Jackson noted in December, fentanyl use spiked largely due to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which lockdowns and job loss and isolation took a deadly toll. “The supply,” he wrote, “was brought by drug cartels flooding illegal substances and people across Joe Biden’s open border. Cartels are lacing other drugs with fentanyl, hooking unsuspecting people on counterfeit and deadly pills.”

Not only that, but China is complicit in both pandemics — one flu and the other fentanyl. “China remains the primary source of fentanyl,” as Fox News reports. “It is either shipped to the U.S. directly via international mail or shipped via Mexico, [and] U.S. lawmakers say the crime syndicates in China operate with the knowledge of the Communist Party.”

The news isn’t all bad, though. Just yesterday, Mexican authorities reported that they’d made a “historic seizure” of fentanyl in a warehouse raid in Sinaloa on July 2. As Fox News reports: “Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejia called it the largest seizure in history of fentanyl. He estimated the 1,200 pounds of fentanyl found at the warehouse had a black market value of around $230 million.”

Make no mistake: Fentanyl is sneaky deadly. It’s mixed with other drugs, it can be 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, and it’s killing our countrymen by the bushel. Indeed, it’s the number-one cause of death in this country for Americans ages 18-45.

If you know anyone who’s even remotely at risk, reach out before it’s too late.