‘The outrage fades, the gun-industry contributions flow, a nation sighs ...’

Asked about gun laws, President Trump said Tuesday that “we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.” It’s a maddeningly familiar refrain after each massacre. Politicians who are beholden to the gun lobby jump to its talking points:

Now is not the time to make policy decisions.” Don’t politicize the tragedy.” “no Killers will find a way to get their lethal weaponry matter the law.”

It says something about the grip of the gun lobby on America’s elected representatives that a mass slaughter such as the one we saw in Las Vegas last weekend is met with resignation instead of resolve.

None of them would dare say after a devastating earthquake or dam breach: This is not the time to raise engineering standards.

None of them would dare not ask after the fatal Ghost Ship fire: How many other warehouses are vulnerable?

None of them would dare say after millions of Americans lost their homes and savings through banks’ recklessness: This is not the time to tighten regulation of the financial industry. OK, OK, more than a few politicians, shamefully after the 2008 debacle, but that’s a story for another day. We do know this. None of them dared say after 9/11: Because we cannot anticipate every conceivable mode of terrorist attack, this is not the time to take unprecedented steps to make it more difficult for the evildoers. So emerged the Patriot Act, the extraordinary security measures at airports and the Department of Homeland Security. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were rationalized as necessary in an all-out effort, direct and indirect, to counter the terrorist threat.

No such urgency has followed the mass shootings of Americans by Americans. In the lunacy of U.S. gun laws that are singularly promiscuous by the standards of industrialized nations, even suspected terrorists on the no-fly list are allowed to buy deadly firearms. Let that one sink in. Someone is considered too dangerous to board a plane, even after physical screening, yet is allowed to walk into a gun shop and buy weapons capable of inflicting mass carnage.

I’ve been writing and editing commentary on mass shootings for more than 20 years at this newspaper. While the magnitude of the massacres has only intensified, Congress has passed only the most modest of gun-control measures, such as a 2008 law for better updating of records of people prohibited from buying weapons (such as those with documented mental health issues or certain criminal convictions). The National Rifle Association supported that bill, thank you very much, mostly out of its concern for people prevented from buying firearms because of outdated databases.

At least House Republican leaders had the decency after Las Vegas to delay a vote that would have loosened access to gun silencers. Also in the congressional hopper is a measure that would allow people with concealed-weapon permits in their home states to carry a shrouded firearm in other states, even those with more restrictive laws.

Meanwhile, significant public safety measures such as an assault weapons ban or the extension of background checks to gun shows and Internet sales continue to languish. And so it goes. The outrage fades, the gun-industry contributions flow, a nation sighs (in relief or frustration, depending on one’s interpretation of the Second Amendment) until the next horrific event leads to a new round of declarations that this is no time to act.

Americans are asked to merely offer “thoughts and prayers” — and wait, yet again, for sign of a spine to form in Congress.

As time goes by.