It’s rare to see what’s sold as a mutual political affinity revealed as a raw power relationship, but that is what happened to Senator Marco Rubio at the CNN town hall on Wednesday night, in Sunrise, Florida. Would the senator refuse to take money from the N.R.A., a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had survived the murder of his peers, asked. Rubio, the realities of Republican Party power shining like perspiration on his face, refused not only to make that pledge but to make even a semi-plausible defense of why he would not, as would once have been, in the old-fashioned sense, the politic thing to do. The audience booed.

Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the N.R.A., in a speech the next morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference, outside Washington, D.C., made evident the deeper social compact that gives the gun lobby such power in the face of all reason and, at the moment, universal grief. The issue, as LaPierre presented it, is no longer simply defending guns. The tattered old apologies by the way of hunting and target shooting and even self-defense are absent. Guns now are the symbol of a license to hate the other: the liberals and the media and the rest who are part of a “socialist wave.” He told the CPAC audience, “You should be frightened. If they seize power, if these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate, and, God forbid, they get the White House again, our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.”

Instead of even defending the N.R.A.’s peculiar reading of the Second Amendment, which literally excises the “well-regulated militia” part as though it had never been written, LaPierre ranted against Democrats. The villains included Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and by implication, Barack Obama—as though the Republican Party wasn’t fully in control of all the levers of the federal government. He also warned against the F.B.I., Saul Alinsky, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer. (Though LaPierre evinced no such freedom-loving worries about of the presence of France’s Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the extreme-right niece of Marine Le Pen who spoke at CPAC an hour after him.) What LaPierre seemed to be saying was that true Americans need a right to a lethal weapon in order to show that they can’t be intimidated by their political opponents. To an astonishing degree, his argument has become bald and brutal: you are the gun that you own.

Further Reading New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.

And yet, in the face of this absolute rejection of reason, we’re being suddenly bombarded with the idea that what really needs to happen is for citizens on different sides of the issue to reconcile with one another. As a matter of practical politics—and there is no higher calling in a democracy than practical politics—it would be wonderful to come together on, say, an assault-weapons ban like the one that once worked, within limits, in this country from 1994 to 2004, when Congress failed to renew it. But, this week, the Florida legislature, again with an audience of students watching, voted against even considering such a ban, including one on the AR-15, the gun used in the Parkland massacre. At the CNN town hall, after Rubio was asked about a ban, he said that, given all the legal loopholes, legislators would end up having to ban all assault weapons, a line that was met by cheers. The next day, Rubio tweeted that even a ban on semiautomatic weapons “is a position well outside the mainstream.”

Earlier this week, David Brooks got into perhaps undue trouble for contending, in the Times, that people in blue states are apparently responsible, through their condescension and their certainty, for driving red-state people to, well, cling to their guns after gun massacres. “The people who defend gun rights believe that snobbish elites look down on their morals and want to destroy their culture,” he wrote. “If we end up telling such people that they and their guns are despicable, they will just despise us back and dig in their heels.” Blue-state people need to put on a show of “respect” for the gun enthusiasts, because, without that, “we don’t really have policy debates anymore. We have one big tribal conflict, and policy fights are just proxy battles as each side tries to establish moral superiority.” Others have taken this line of reasoning into previously unexplored areas of fatuousness, so one can read in Friday’s New York Post that a desire to own an AR-15, in its cultural context, is “no different from wanting a Louboutin or a Birkin bag.”

The trouble is that what most of the blue-state people want is not a tribal triumph, to be cured by an act of obeisance, but rather actually to end gun violence. A lethal weapon designed solely to devastate a human body and explode the organs inside is, as a matter of inarguable fact, nothing in the world like a Birkin bag. It is odd that the same people who are usually so ready to condemn any form of moral relativism are so eager to embrace this kind. It’s wrong, they often tell us, to say that this or that element of Islamic practice is just “their culture”; but we should tip-toe around people who keep military weapons of mass killing, because, you see, it’s theirs. There may indeed be some among them who do believe that bags and small-arms artillery are alike. But many views widely held are wrong. You should always try to meet the other side halfway, but you can only meet people halfway when you are both living on the same planet.

As a matter of both morals and practice, you do not change bad beliefs best by placating those who hold them. You change them by refusing to placate those who hold them. You change them by relentlessly challenging them until enough people become ashamed of holding the bad beliefs. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of infinite patience, committed to peaceful change. This meant that he was opposed to acts of violence against bigots. It did not mean that he thought that there was a respectable case to be made for violent bigotry. If you do not want to be thought complicit in the mass murder of children, the best way is to cease to be complicit in the mass murder of children.

On Friday morning, Donald Trump spoke at CPAC, where he persisted in propagating his sick vision of a future America where heavily armed kindergarten instructors mow down determined psychopaths. “A teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened,” Trump said, of the high-school shooter. As everyone with even minimal knowledge of how firearms work and how firefights happen has tried to explain to him—including those firmly on the Murdoch right—this is a loony fantasy. On Friday, the New York Post’s Ralph Peters, than whom no man is more firmly anti-bleeding heart, wrote that “when the shooting starts, even the best-trained, most disciplined soldiers and cops—US Army Rangers or NYPD SWAT members—don’t put every round on target. The notion that a guard or teacher who goes to the range once a quarter would keep kids safe is profoundly divorced from reality.” But a world divorced from reality, completely unlike the one we inhabit, is the place where Trump and the N.R.A.’s leaders now live, and from which no amount of kindly cajoling apparently will persuade them to emerge. The problem is that the rest of us, and our children, have to live there with them.