Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump said in a brief address on Thursday, is “a great and safe community.” The day before, though, a nineteen-year-old carrying an AR-15-style assault weapon that he had purchased legally allegedly walked into the local high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and killed seventeen people. The accused shooter, Nikolas Cruz, is now in custody. Trump, in his address, said that “no child, no teacher, should ever be in danger in an American school.” And yet, apart from a vague offer to share Parkland’s “burden,” he mentioned only one policy response: to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” Beyond that, he said, people should answer “cruelty with kindness,” seeking the kind of human connection that “turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors.”

What does it mean to be a friend and neighbor, though, in a country thick with guns? In tweets posted earlier on Thursday, Trump had—this is not a surprise—taken a different tone, one that seemed less to sympathize with the people of Parkland than to blame them, including the children. “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” Does the President believe that high-school students who had to huddle in closets, holding on to one another, before a SWAT team rescued them, are somehow to blame for not having done enough to raise the alarm?

As it happens, many of them seem to have alerted authorities, one way or the other; Cruz had been transferred from the school. Teachers had been warned to be alert if he appeared. His own mother, who had adopted him when he was an infant, reportedly, had sought help. (She died late last year; the family of a friend took him in and, according to the Sun-Sentinel, members of that family say, through representatives, that they saw no warning signs, apart from a moodiness and depression that they attributed to the loss of a parent. That picture may be clarified in the days to come.) There were two reports to the F.B.I. about YouTube posts from an account that bore the name “Nikolas Cruz,” referring to a desire to be a “professional school shooter.” (At a press conference on Thursday morning, the F.B.I. said that it hadn’t been able to run those tips down.) When Trump said that concerns needed to be reported “again and again,” he may, without meaning to, have echoed their frustration.

The thing that happens again and again—and again, and again, and again; at least eight times this year so far—is school shootings. And night-club shootings, and concert shootings. More and more often, the weapon is an AR-15, or something like it. Also on Thursday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “It cannot be denied that something dangerous and unhealthy is happening in our country.” But crime has, generally, been falling in the United States over the past decade and a half. One thing that has happened, in terms of mass shootings, is the expiration, during the George W. Bush Administration, of the ban on assault weapons. The Republicans, and many Democrats, have blocked almost every attempt to even moderately change gun laws. As Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut—the site of the Sandy Hook shooting—put it, this goes beyond indifference to the realm of “complicity.” And too many Republican politicians, including the President, have, distinctly, encouraged the idea that gun control is part of some federally based plot to take control of America away from “real” Americans.

One result is that American children drill—again and again—for mass shootings. Anyone with a child might be in the position of hearing awful, alarming reports on the news, and then rushing to text sons or daughters, wondering if even that is safe, or if the sound of the alert might reveal their child’s hiding place to a shooter. As my colleague John Cassidy notes, students around the country have been trained to turn their phones to silent at the start of a drill. They have been told what to imagine. Do they also have to take on the role of policing teen-agers who may live in houses with multiple, legal weapons? How can they tell the difference between the pathology of their parents, who have done nothing to make the gun laws in this country more sensible, and that of their peers?

According to the Sun-Sentinel, the family that took Cruz in knew that he owned a gun—again, legally—and just asked him to keep it locked in a cabinet. “It was his gun,” a lawyer for the family said—and that phrase explains as much about this country as about this crime.

Children often need help, and they also must be able to get it. Mental health is a major problem—under-recognized, under-addressed, under-resourced. One might wonder why the Republican Party only seems to notice that when there is a chance that access to guns might be reduced—not when access to health insurance, of the sort that includes mental-health coverage, might be increased. (As Adam Gopnik writes, there are mentally ill people everywhere, but only so many shootings of this kind here.) But the cynicism is even greater than that. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, also speaking on Thursday, echoed Trump in portraying Parkland as a mental-health issue. Last February, as Vox notes, the House, with Republican support, passed a bill overturning an Obama Administration rule that prevented certain people with mental illnesses (those deemed so mentally disabled that they couldn’t manage their own Social Security benefits) from purchasing guns. Trump signed it. The narrowness of that Obama-era restriction opens up the question of what “mentally ill” means in this context, beyond being a way for gun advocates to change the subject.

Further Reading New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.

On Thursday morning, the Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel, spoke movingly about the victims, including a football coach he had worked with, Aaron Feis, who died protecting students. The sheriff encouraged the public to help forestall such crimes, giving the example of noticing that a neighbor who, on Fridays, usually arrived home with a shopping bag with “milk and eggs sticking out” was instead carrying a bag of bullets; that would be something to report, he said. The police, he thought, should have more power to pull people in when they sensed that something was off, in order to assess people for mental-health issues. He also listed a fascination with guns as a sign that someone might be a candidate for such involuntary confinement. That fascination can be found at gun shows that hand AR-15s over with no background checks—they’re a legal product, advertised and lovingly marketed and displayed—and at conventions attended by politicians of both parties who take money from the National Rifle Association. The proffering of mental illness as the answer to our shooting problem seems opportunistic, to say the least. It might necessitate a criminalization of adolescent pain, since the level of legal procedure necessary to make someone ineligible to buy a gun would, presumably, be higher than what would be needed to guide a teen-ager to a therapist. (In Florida, the legal standard for blocking gun purchases is that someone has actually been committed to a mental institution or been “adjudicated mentally defective.”) The greater madness is in our gun laws, not in our children.