Those among us who are connoisseurs of the darkest of contemporary ironies—something it pays to be in Donald Trump’s America—will no doubt already have heard of the keenest and perhaps most unspeakable irony of them all: the twenty-seven-year-old Telemachus Orfanos, who somehow survived the Las Vegas massacre, last year, in which fifty-eight people were helplessly mown down by a deranged man with an arsenal of legally obtained and modified semi-automatic weapons, was among those killed when another deranged man, with a legally purchased high-powered Glock handgun, killed twelve helpless people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California. So far, none of the survivors of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that took place—what was it, two weeks ago?—in which eleven people died, seem to have crossed paths, “Appointment in Samarra” style, with their successors in the American shooting lottery. Sit tight, though, and it may happen in the next gun massacre, which will doubtless unfold within the next few months, if not weeks. Americans may soon start congratulating one another on how many near-misses they have endured, with “Missed Me!” bumper stickers and “I Survived My Third Gun Massacre This Year and All I Got Was This T-Shirt” T-shirts.

As the pace of mass shootings seems only to intensify, the possibility of action, at least on a federal level, seems to recede. It is overwhelmingly clear that the majority of Americans want to move away from the misread Second Amendment madness toward comprehensive gun sanity—and just as clear that no national political path forward can be found right now. Not because not enough people want it but because the deep democratic deficits in our system, which have been making themselves felt in so many spheres recently, prevent it. An electoral system designed from its inception to give undue weight to rural white men is giving undue weight to rural white men who, for whatever reason, value weapons at the expense of lives. That system is also responsible for the pervasive underrepresentation of liberal Justices on the Supreme Court; Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the last five Presidential elections, but the Court now tilts far right, and the absurd Heller decision, from 2008, which found a constitutional right to individual gun ownership where none had been known before, remains in place.

There are signs of hope, though. Every survey shows approval of saner gun laws receiving record levels of support: according to an October Gallup poll, sixty-one per cent of Americans want stricter laws on the sale of firearms, and among Democrats the number rises to eighty-seven per cent. Many of the newly elected Democratic members of Congress are outspoken gun-control advocates, most notably—if tragically so—Lucy McBath, of Georgia, who lost a child to a shooter and made gun control a, if not the, primary plank of her campaign platform. Voters in Washington State passed a ban on assault weapons. State action is crippled, though, by the ease with which guns travel from state to state, and city action is still more crippled by the ease with which weaponry travels within a state. But even limited measures can have outsized results. We have to hope that, while we wait for the tipping point in Congress, the local measures will help. Meanwhile, the unaccounted and enormous social price of the prevalence of gun massacres grows. Last week I walked into a hotel and saw, where one would expect to find posted notices about what to do in case of fire, directions about what to do in case of an active shooter. Regular active-shooter drills are the current, undoubtedly traumatizing, reality for schoolchildren, and the Department of Homeland Security invites employers to download this poster with instructions for handling a shooter in the workplace.

No one need look for help from Trump. The demands for gun sanity are not even within the range of his hearing, nor that of his easily bullied political dependents. There are many degrees of complicity in the moral universe, apart from simple guilt: unconscious collusion, deliberate negligence, and gross deliberate negligence among them. Historians of violence will consider all these in passing verdicts on our gun-obsessed society and on the politicians who did nothing to rein it in. Meanwhile, Susan Orfanos, the mother of Telemachus, offered the only rational response, albeit one edged in black, this time not in irony but in maternal grief: “I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts,” she said. “I want gun control.”