“It doesn’t take care of all the crime,” she added, “but it reduces the amount.”

Across the ocean and 16 years later, America absorbed its own massacre of 5- and 6-year-olds at the school in Newtown. The inaction that emerged from Washington, however, was the opposite of what came out of Westminster after the Dunblane shooting. And in the three years since 20 children were fatally shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School, no consensus on the rewriting of national gun laws in America has formed.

Rather, some say, the supporters of gun rights have seemed to gain strength, stymying President Obama’s efforts to craft laws that would help reduce the kind of mass shootings that now occur regularly around the country. The support for an automatic weapons ban, in fact, has seemingly been silenced.

While the killings at Sandy Hook might have “hit over the head” people predisposed toward action intended to counter America’s epidemic of gun violence, “the rest of the nation was not hit in quite the same way,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska.

“There were more people who said, ‘Well, we ought to put more guns in schools,’” in the hands of law enforcement or security officers, Mr. Walker said.

To him, such a response reflects the worship of guns in American culture.

“It’s like a religious object, an extension of your body,” he said. “We can’t begin to make any progress in controlling it.”