Vaping is deadly. So is gun violence.

Yet Trump, McConnell won’t act to control guns.

There’s a new deadly menace stalking America: vaping. Health authorities blame it for sickening at least 380 people so far and killing six of them. So President Trump is moving to ban most flavored e-cigarettes. Good for him. But he’s still doing nothing about a far deadlier plague that America has known about for much longer.

About 100 Americans die every day , on average, from guns. That means some 2,000 lives have been lost in gun-related incidents since the first report of a vaping death. In 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 39,773 gunshot fatalities.

Those deaths included five widely publicized mass shootings, among them at the Fort Lauderdale airport, which took five lives, and the Las Vegas massacre that claimed 58. Data for 2018, incorporating the 17 deaths at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, are yet to come.

While it’s the mass shootings that have spread terror across the land and are forcing school children to “learn active shooting drills before they’ve learned to read,” as South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg observed during the Democratic debate Thursday night, it’s the killings you rarely hear about that take the greater toll on lives and on society. Gang and domestic violence. Street crime. Suicides. Children who find guns at home and other accidents.

Sen. Cory Booker, a former mayor of Newark, put that into a staggering perspective during the same debate.

“We have had more people die due to gun violence in my lifetime than every single war in this country combined, from the Revolutionary War until now,” he said.

No one proposed solution can put it a stop to it, but collectively all would help. Taken together, they might end our disgrace as the only advanced nation where anarchy rules.

It’s an anarchy forced upon 327 million people by the self-interest of the National Rifle Association, which once supported responsible gun legislation but is now a tool of manufacturers who need to sell ever more guns — a notably durable product — to stay in business.

The NRA owes its power not to reason or common sense but to its perverse influence over Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other pusillanimous politicians.

Writing in the New York Times, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, plugged for red-flag laws. But killers don’t necessarily flash warning signals and when they do, they’re sometimes ignored. Rubio needs to dial up the courage for more than that.

Although no one law would be a cureall, universal background checks are the most obvious and, theoretically, the easiest response to our national crisis. They are already required before sales by licensed dealers, but private sales and gun shows are glaring exceptions.

Background checks do work. According to the chief sponsor in the House, every day they block legal sales to 170 felons and 50 domestic abusers. But the determined ones can find a private sale or a gun show.

A ban on assault weapons, or at least the high-capacity magazines that make them even deadlier, is also essential. Beginning with Columbine High School in 1999, there have been 37 mass shootings costing 443 lives and hundreds more dreadful injuries. At Dayton, Ohio, last month, it took only 30 seconds for someone to kill nine people and injure 27 before police who were on the scene shot him dead. He fired at least 41 shots in that half-minute, which he could not have done with a six-shot revolver — a weapon that was banned even in the frontier days at Dodge City.

According to a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll, 89 percent of Americans favor universal background checks and 86 percent approve of “red flag” laws to take guns away from people who are demonstrably dangerous to themselves or others.

Despite the unprecedented public opinion, McConnell still refuses to let the Senate vote on the House-passed bill to expand background checks or on any other gun legislation.

The only opinion he cares about is Trump’s.

And Trump has been dithering, promising on one hand to seriously consider legislation and on another — his last word — to “protect the Second Amendment.”

Deference to the chief executive is not how any representative government, let alone ours, is supposed to work.

“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” wrote the anonymous author of Federalist

51. It was either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton.

To check the Congress, however, the Constitution gave the president the power of veto. And because it might be “perfidiously abused,” they gave Congress the ability to override a veto.

Congress should do its job and let the president do his job to reduce the country’s biggest threat: gun violence.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.