It is downright depressing to watch Americans being gunned down in churches, at pop-music concerts, in Grade 1 classrooms, and to know that there is nothing anyone can do about it. The U.S. debate over gun control is, for the moment, a settled one, and not even the most gruesome killing seems able to prompt change.
But that doesn't mean anyone should stop trying. A majority of Americans supports gun controls, including a ban on assault-style weapons. Those who want sanity to return to this issue are not giving up.
Yes, the gun-rights activists have the upper hand. From the President down, they spew platitudes and disinformation in the wake of each mass shooting, such as the one in a Texas church on Sunday.
Donald Trump called the slaughter of 26 churchgoers a mental-health issue, a reference to the violent and troubled past of the shooter, and an effort to deflect the gun-control argument.
But a 2015 study reported in The New York Times this week shows that the U.S. spends as much money on mental-health care, and has a similar rate of severe mental disorders, as other countries – while still producing five times the number of mass shooters as the second closest country.
Other gun-rights fundamentalists suggested last Sunday's shooting could have been prevented if the churchgoers had been armed – a favoured argument of the National Rifle Association, and one easily debunked. How could people at an outdoor concert have fired back at a heavily-armed shooter raining down nine bullets a second on them from 32 stories above, as happened in Las Vegas on Oct. 1?
And then there are those who always argue that the aftermath of a mass shooting is "not the time" to discuss gun control. They say it knowing full well they never intend to discuss the issue, ever.
These false arguments, along with the quasi-religious belief that Americans have a constitutional right to own all the guns they want, are used to stifle discussion of a truth that is terrifying to gun lobbyists and the politicians in their pay: that the only reason America has more mass shootings and more violent crime than any other country is because it has way more guns than any other country.
That is the only consistent correlation that researchers can find to explain America's epidemic of mass shootings, according to the study quoted in the Times.
Some day, this immutable fact will catch up with the defenders of unlimited gun rights in the U.S., and they will be discredited.