In 29 states, permits must be issued to applicants unless they are felons or mentally incompetent, and 12 states have abolished permitting entirely. In 24 states, no gun training is required to carry a gun. Congress is now considering a bill, called concealed carry reciprocity, to require that every state’s concealed-carry standard be accepted by every other state. This would have the effect of undercutting states with stricter laws since it would impose a national lowest-common-denominator standard.

A different effort to thwart a successful gun law is afoot in Congress: The House of Representatives was poised to pass a bill to remove the 1934 N.F.A. background check, registration and fee requirements one must satisfy to own a gun silencer (also called “suppressors”). Because of the Las Vegas shooting, that bill is now shelved, but when things die down, expect its progress to resume.

The reason for the change? Advocates argue that silencers are almost never used in crimes, and that silencers help protect the gun users’ hearing. Yet the very reason silencers were originally subject to registration regulations was because they were used in crimes, and because their chief utility was to conceal gun crimes and illegal hunting with guns. And while the modern idea of protecting the shooter’s hearing is laudable, the more effective method for doing so would be to subsidize gun owners’ ownership of proper hearing-protection devices, precisely so that innocent bystanders can tell where hostile fire is coming from — whether in the woods during hunting season or in the killing grounds of downtown Las Vegas.

The gun issue is virtually the only one where the default response is increasingly to shrug and say that laws don’t matter, since bad people do bad things, so why bother with new ones? That facile and false logic jumps over an obvious question: Shouldn’t the government do more to keep highly destructive weapons from the wrong hands? Sure, it’s a politically fraught question, but it’s no less important.

Admittedly, mass shooters tend to be individuals with little or no serious criminal past, making them hard to identify before they commit these acts. Recent research has suggested a high correlation with their abuse of intimate partners or family members, but a vast majority of abusers will never pick up a gun and shoot a bunch of people. Still, many mass shooters do give indications of impending violence to those around them, and only a few states have any measures in place to pick up on that. New York, as it happens, is one, with its extensive character background investigation for pistol permit applicants (a process I underwent). Other states would do well to follow its lead.

If we can’t settle on sensible gun regulations in the wake of Sandy Hook or San Bernardino or Orlando or now Las Vegas (or Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech before them), when will we? Maybe the answer will emerge when the nation’s cumulative gun violence toxicity level reaches a critical tipping point. Are we there yet?