When I go to fairs and festivals this summer, am I going to be spending much of my time looking over my shoulder, scanning fairgoers for some madman armed to the teeth who plans to start firing indiscriminately into the crowd?

In all of the years I have gone to these fairs and festivals, I never worried about something like this, but I have to admit that I will this year.

For some reason, it seems as if these demented gunmen are choosing to shoot up fairs, festivals and street parties in ever increasing numbers. I guess in some respects it’s understandable, because this is where many people congregate, and some of these lunatics want to inflict maximum death and mayhem as they seek their misguided 15 minutes of infamy.

Just within the last four months, here is a sample of what I am talking about:

• Two were killed and 28 injured in a shooting at a street festival in Baltimore earlier this month.

• A man accused of fatally shooting two people and wounding several others at a Washington state music festival earlier this month told police he was high on psychedelic mushrooms and believed the world was ending.

• Three people were killed and eight others injured when several men fired indiscriminately into a crowd of hundreds who had gathered in a Texas neighborhood following a festival.

• Police in Newark, New Jersey, are investigating to find the gunman who shot up a city neighborhood after a Portugal Day Festival in June.

• Four persons were treated for gunshot wounds in downtown Austin, Texas, earlier this year as the city concluded the South by Southwest Festival.

• Last August at the popular Musikfest in Bethlehem, a 20-year-old man was shot and had to be hospitalized.

It doesn’t matter whether you are going shopping at a mall, eating at a favorite restaurant or engaging in social or athletic events, it just seems as if no venue is entirely safe.

Of course, we don’t want fear to rule our lives, but I sometimes feel that as I get older the odds are going to catch up with me, and I will wind up being in the wrong place at the wrong time just as thousands of others have been.

They did not provoke a fatal response. They were merely going through the motions of life when they were suddenly cut down by a complete stranger because of some real or imagined slight done to the shooter, presumably by society, a loved one or someone else. Or they had an off-the-wall political agenda that they believed called for this kind of unhinged action.

The proliferation of mass shootings in the United States is the reason we now must be wary of doing things we did not that long ago without a second thought. I suspect that you have had these uneasy thoughts, too, as you venture out and about, even if they might be fleeting.

In “How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” Leonard Mlodinow says that the human mind is built to identify a definite cause and can, therefore, have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors.

Writing in Psychology Today, Dr. Ralph Lewis says, “For many people, the idea that randomness rules our lives is counterintuitive, unappealing and frightening; moreover, randomness feels purposeless and meaningless to many.”

It is common for us to want to believe that “everything happens for a reason” or that things are “meant to be,” or that something occurred because it was “part of God’s plan.”

That is why in situations such as these all-too-frequent mass shootings we are left with this nagging, uneasy feeling that next time we are the ones who might be in the line of fire through no fault of our own.

Apparently we are not alone in our concerns. In a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, one-third of U.S. adults said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events.

By BRUCE FRASSINELLI| tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.