I won’t pretend to be more religious than the next person, nor am I afraid to call myself a Christian. Like a lot of Americans, I have a complicated relationship with my faith. But that shouldn’t lessen our sense of moral obligation in the face of what some blithely call the new normal. Nor should we fall for the siren call of more guns, the unproven good-guy-with-a-gun myth, something many of my fellow Texans have indulged in over the past few days. Instead, we have a duty to confront these machines and the profiteering behind them.

It is easy to feel numb, powerless and hopeless. For the dead, one can only grimace at that last moment of fear. For the survivors and their beloved, a harsh sentence awaits. First, there is the trauma, like an amputation, something C. S. Lewis wrote about after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid,” Lewis, a member of the Anglican Church, wrote in the slender and tortured memoir “A Grief Observed.” “The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

When traumatic death strikes, the most common question is, “Why?” The second most common question is invariably, “Where was God?” But the last and most troubling of all is, “What does God want?” It is the same cry that Jesus let out from the cross as darkness spread across the land: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I won’t pretend to know the mind of God, so all I can offer is a simple guess at what he would say: Stop the killing. Of course killing will never end, completely; we are imperfect creatures of free will, prone to sin — the absence of good — as well as beauty. But that is categorically different from allowing the proliferation of machines solely designed to kill large numbers of people quickly, machines that bear no more semblance to a rifle than a nuclear weapon does to a firework. And the sin of omission — doing nothing — is nearly as bad as the murder itself.

In recent years, time after time, the AR-15 or one of its close cousins has played the starring role in an American mass shooting. In Las Vegas it shared a macabre double-billing with the semiautomatic version of the Russian AK-47. Chattanooga. Orlando. San Bernardino. Aurora. These two and the like are nearly always there.