For those of us still stunned and reeling over the 26 deaths in a single Central Texas community, our state's attorney general has a cold scrap of consolatory advice: Better gitcherself a gun, pardner. You're on your own.

Scared, sick, horrified? Get a gun. Disgusted by the continuing mass-killer carnage, which we now seem to blank out of our mutual consciousness within a matter of days? Get a gun. Don't think more firepower is the answer? Then you're a wimp, a bleeding heart, a eunuch. A gun will fix you.

In public remarks made shortly after a narcissistic lunatic's gun slaughter of more than two dozen people at a Sunday morning church service, Attorney General Ken Paxton, who seems to have confused the workaday reality of ordinary life with a pulse-rousing Tom Mix horse opera, prescribed ... more guns.

"We've had shootings in churches for, you know, for forever," Paxton said, as if public mass murder were an unavoidable nuisance of modern life, like traffic jams and internet trolls. "It's going to happen again."

His solution? "I think maybe churches and business and schools need to start thinking about: How do we protect our children? How do we protect our parishioners or our congregants when we're in a position we don't have local law enforcement close or in our own buildings?"

Paxton, of course, is not the only American who is dreamily besotted with the compelling myth that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

A lot of people believe this. It's comforting, it's simple, it makes for a darn good TV yarn. The problem, of course, is that it's demonstrably untrue.

Yes, there are instances of licensed gun owners using their personal weapons to stop crimes. Two civilians who confronted the Sutherland Springs gunman as he left the church may — may — have prevented more deaths when they fired back at him and chased down his car. It was still unclear Monday whether the gunman killed himself or was shot by his pursuers.

But there were still 26 people dead, and more injured, before the passing "good guys" even had a chance to react.

And that's always going to be the case. No matter how many "good guys with guns" you have around, the bad guy — specifically the monster with mass slaughter in mind — has the overwhelming advantage of knowing what's about to happen. He has planned it, envisioned it, fantasized about it in inhuman detail.

Do you know how quickly you would respond in a shots-fired, life-or-death crisis? If you haven't been in one, you don't. It's not like television.

Professionals — law enforcement officers, SWAT teams — have the advantage of specialized training that's constantly reinforced.

And when the professionals arrive, a lot of extra people with guns only makes the situation more dangerous and complicated.

Ken Paxton wants you to think you might be a hero and save the day. Any competent police chief will tell you that the greater likelihood is that you will get yourself or other innocent people killed.

"We don't know who the good guy is versus the bad guy if everybody starts shooting," former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said after the July 2016 murders of five local officers by a single gunman.

What's more distressing than Paxton's simplistic action-movie scenario, though, is his implicit assumption that our public safety institutions — from the local police department up to congressional policymakers — aren't going to be any help.

Of course they can help, if we want them to.

Smarter laws, better emergency response procedures, tougher regulatory efforts, intelligent use of science-based research — these things have all made Americans immeasurably safer: at our jobs, on our highways, in our hospitals, in our own houses.

A similar, multidisciplinary effort directed at reducing gun violence would almost certainly find improvement, if not a blanket solution, to the horrifying regularity of dangerous people with high-powered weapons in our society.

Paxton's grim and cheerless message, which he shares with too many other Texas elected officials, is that personal gun rights, no matter how exaggerated and impractical, matter more than public safety. The only solution is for us to all arm ourselves like warlords in a Mad Max movie.

It's a cruel, dismissive attitude of "you're on your own," and about a half-step away from "if something bad happens to you, it's your own fault." If you're not packin' heat, you're a sitting duck, a rube, a chump. If you want to feel safe ... get a gun.

We're committed in this country to allowing responsible, law-abiding people to own firearms for personal use, and I don't have a quarrel with that.

I have a large and acrimonious quarrel with the depressing notion that government should abdicate its role in keeping us safe, be it from tainted meat, drunk drivers, terrorists, open sewers or sick-in-the-head gun nuts.

Guns — as those with a vested interest in selling them like to tell us — are morally neutral. They're tools. They're not inherently evil.

They are also not inherently magic. They won't make you more courageous or invincible or virile.

Armed "good guys" will never be a shamanistic antidote to armed madmen steeped in their own rage and fantasies. Perpetuating this idea is nothing but an excuse: an excuse for doing nothing.