Even in a jaded and distracted age, the murder of 17 people in a Parkland, Florida, high school on February 14 remains in our headlines nearly two weeks after the fact. For the first time in a while, public sentiment may also be shifting significantly when it comes to the regulation of firearms, with 70 percent of Americans supporting some form of tightening, according to one poll. When Donald Trump asked the Department of Justice to issue regulations banning so-called “bump stocks” on guns, he got minimal grief for it. Florida’s legislators are looking at a raft of new potential laws. Even rental-car companies such as Avis and Hertz are discontinuing special benefits for members of the National Rifle Association, suggesting a shift in the balance of power on this particular front in the culture wars.

But what a dreary front it remains. Our gun debates haven’t changed much over the past 40 years, except that they’ve gotten even uglier and baser, the misunderstandings more deliberate. When Trump thought out loud about whether teachers should bear arms, we got one more outbreak of bad-faith debate. Reporters went around asking teachers how they’d feel about being required to bear arms. Of course, the actual subject for debate was how teachers would feel about allowing some of their fellow teachers to bear arms. Would it bother them if Mrs. Anderson, math teacher, who also happens to be a gun expert, was allowed to carry a holstered revolver to class? It would bother this writer, on balance, but it’s a different idea from what the public was allowed to hear discussed. Americans have become adept at celebrating our differences by exaggerating them and hating one another for it.

Trump is, of course, no help in this scene. He kicked things off by making noises about tightening up the law a little, suggesting that arms purchases should be restricted to ages 21 and over. Then he delivered a rowdy oration to the Conservative Political Action Conference suggesting that an armed teacher “would have shot the hell out” of the Florida killer and alleging that liberals wanted to do away with the Second Amendment. Then, to cap things off, on Monday he claimed he’d have run in unarmed to fight off the shooter himself. Overall, Trump is probably inclined to do something minor on gun regulations, and he could get away with it. Breitbart’s writers have done no more than grumble softly about his ideas. But he can’t do anything big.

Second Amendment activists have legitimate grievances about how the debate over guns is covered—journalists are poorly informed on the issue—and many firearm restrictions would help less than people think. We have about 300 million guns in circulation, and criminals will continue to have an easy time getting them, even if guns were reduced slightly in number. We also have a killing problem that exists independent of guns. As the criminologist James Q. Wilson pointed out a decade ago, our non-gun homicide rate is still triple that of England. With or without guns, Americans are violent, period.

Those on Team Blue must also admit that pushing for tighter gun regulations often substitutes for other thoughts. The mass shooting in San Bernardino in late 2015 was a planned act of terrorism, yet The New York Times chose to respond with a front-page editorial about gun policy, as if that were the start and end of the story. (Surely, focusing only on the shooter’s weapon in a case of Islamic terrorism is as monomaniacal as looking only at the shooter’s religion.) For liberals, gun control, regardless of the nuances, is also a unifying goal, and pushing for it is cost-free, since most of us don’t own them, don’t plan to, and see no ordinary use for them. It’s like restricting the choice of metals for our lunar explorers. Go ahead.