For better — or probably worse — politicians who maintain a do-nothing position on gun control assume a military silence in the wake of these tragedies. But the Republican Party’s propagandists become afflicted with logorrhea.

The disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly posted on his website about the killing field on the Las Vegas Strip:

“This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”

The increasingly incoherent televangelist Pat Robertson went so far as to blame the Las Vegas shooting on a culture of disrespect, including “profound disrespect of our president” and “disrespect, now, for our national anthem.”

So, let me get this straight: Because Americans refuse to respect a bigoted, white supremacist, misogynist, transphobic bully with fascist leanings and Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to quietly protest racial injustice and police violence, Paddock shot up a country music festival? Ummm, yeah, right.

But in a way, the gun-control debate had been dying all along.

It died a little bit when much of America simply accepted that we have at least as many guns as people. It died a little when Americans accepted that over 30,000 people a year die of gun injuries in this country. It died a little bit when every American didn’t see as an untenable perversion the fact that in the wake of mass shootings, gun sales and gun stocks rise instead of fall. It died a little when Americans began to accept as normal something that is absolutely not normal.

America is an anomaly. We stand alone. When it comes to this particular kind and scale of gun violence, America is exceptional.

And yet, the fact here is that the N.R.A., the gun lobby and their congressional co-conspirators have, unfortunately, won this round. They have proved that the fear of infringement is thicker than the blood of children.