The day of a recent school shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the superintendent of the local school district offered parents guidance on how to talk with their children about the incident, in which a teacher, an 8-year-old student and the gunman all died.

“Be willing to listen to their story and be willing to listen to their story multiple times,” the superintendent said. “Reassure them that the danger that they faced has passed.”

It was kind and sensible advice, and if I hadn’t read it in a news story on my way home from seeing “Church & State,” an Off Broadway play that takes forceful exception to the pervasive gun violence in the United States, the words might not have struck me the way they did. As it was, I couldn’t help thinking that the broader danger had not at all passed, and that there’s no assuaging the generalized dread that courses through our culture with every fresh headline-grabbing slaughter, and in between.

“I for one am tired of being afraid,” a Southern senator says in the play, reversing his stance on gun control after a massacre at his children’s school.