School shootings are now as American as apple pie, and Friday’s tragedy at Santa Fe High School, in Santa Fe, Texas, followed the usual recipe. People who knew the suspected shooter, a seventeen-year-old named Dimitrios Pagourtzis, said there was nothing particularly unusual about him. (Pagourtzis appeared in court briefly on Friday night, where he was charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a peace officer, and was remanded to custody.) He made the Santa Fe Junior High honor roll, in 2012, and played on the 2016 junior-varsity football team. Fellow-students said he wasn’t particularly social. (Nor are many other males of his age.) According to CNN, his Facebook page showed he had demonstrated interest in joining the Marines, but more recently he had posted a picture of a black T-shirt with the words “Born to Kill” emblazoned on it.

The Times added some details to the all-too-familiar portrait of an alienated, but not obviously pathologically dangerous, adolescent. He posted pictures of his beloved trench coat, the one he used to cover up the guns he carried into school on Friday morning, along with explanations of the symbols he had attached to it. “Hammer and Sickle=Rebellion. Rising Sun=Kamikaze Tactics. Iron Cross=Bravery. Baphomet=Evil.” In addition, the Times reported, Pagourtzis “posted artwork seemingly inspired by the electronic musician James Kent, professionally known as Perturbator. Kent’s music—largely instrumental—has been adopted by affiliates of neo-Nazi groups and the alt-right.”

About the only atypical aspect of the shooting was that Pagourtzis reportedly used a Remington Model 870 shotgun and a .38-calibre revolver, rather than a semi-automatic rifle, to kill his ten victims and wound ten others. This was probably because his father didn’t own an AR-15 or any other weapon of war. (Pagourtzis told police he used his father’s guns. It wasn’t immediately clear whether his father knew that they were in his possession.) Enthusiasts of semi-automatic weapons will presumably use this detail to fortify their case against banning such weapons—the argument being that there are firearms of all kinds (more than three hundred million in private hands across the U.S., according to some estimates) and banning one particular type of gun won’t prevent a dedicated shooter from carrying out a massacre.

In the world of Second Amendment devotees, this qualifies as a legitimate case to make. So does the argument, which Donald Trump and the N.R.A. have made, that the real issue with school shootings isn’t the fact that disturbed adolescents have such ready access to deadly weapons but that schools don’t have enough armed teachers to stop gun-wielding intruders, or enough ready escape routes for students and staff to take as they flee the gunfire. “We have to look at the design of our schools moving forward and retrofitting schools that are already built,” Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, said on Friday. “And what I mean by that is there are too many entrances and too many exits to our over eight thousand campuses in Texas . . . Had there been one single entrance, possibly, for every student, maybe he”—Pagourtzis—“would have been stopped.”

Rather than descending further into the world of deliberate denial, it is perhaps worth stating a few facts: this was the second school massacre in three months, and the second gun massacre in six months in Texas. Last November, Devin Patrick Kelly, a twenty-six-year-old Air Force veteran with a record of domestic abuse and mental issues, shot dead twenty-six worshippers at the First Baptist Church, in Sutherland Springs, near San Antonio. (Kelly used a semi-automatic weapon.) Since then, and not counting what happened on Friday, there have been at least three other shootings in Texas in which five or more people were killed. The United States has eight times more gun deaths, relative to its population, than Canada, twenty-seven times more than Denmark, and is almost on a par with Iraq.

At this stage, it would be lunacy to expect another gun massacre to change anything in Washington. On Friday, Trump said, “This has been going on too long in our country,” but he didn’t give any indication that he would revisit the decision he took, after the Parkland shooting, to challenge the N.R.A. Only two weeks ago, Trump addressed the gun group’s annual meeting, and said, “Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never, ever be under siege as long as I am your President.” Even if Trump, by some miracle, did decide to try to do something meaningful on guns, the Republicans in Congress would prevent him.

As I noted in a post back in March, the gun-control issue isn’t entirely frozen. A number of states, including Florida, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, have passed so-called red-flag provisions, which empower judges to take guns away from people they conclude to be potentially dangerous. Vermont, which has traditionally been a gun-friendly state, recently passed legislation to expand background checks, raise the legal age for buying guns to twenty-one, and ban bump stocks that enable rapid fire. In Texas on Friday, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, called for stronger backgrounds checks and the passage of a red-flag provision. Such developments offer glimmers of hope. But the only way things will change in Washington, D.C., is if, come November, the voters elect a very different Congress.