Here we are after yet another mass shooting, saying all the same things. Except that the most eloquent voices coming from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a gunman killed 17 people on Wednesday — and about the only new ones — are the surviving children themselves.

They mostly hid while a former student — expelled, who said on YouTube he planned to become a “professional school shooter,” and who had joined white-supremacist groups apparently got tired of shooting and fled the building. They knew him, and many knew of his mental illness.

What scared them, though, was his AR-15 assault rifle, not his mental disturbance. It’s not complicated.

Said one, addressing a particularly dimwitted cable-news talking head:

“At the end of the day, the students at my school felt one shared experience — our politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools,” another wrote in an essay at CNN.com.

“A gun has killed 17 of my fellow classmates. A gun has traumatized my friends. My entire school, traumatized from this tragedy. This could have been prevented. Please stfu tomi,” tweeted a third.

Read:Why terrified Florida students live-streamed their high school’s mass shooting

Anyone who’s being at all honest knows the compromise the Parkland, Fla., shooting demands: Liberals accept (as they long have) that many people want the right to have guns for sport shooting, hunting and personal protection. And self-styled conservatives accept that assault weapons like the ones used in Florida, in Las Vegas last October, in Orlando 20 months ago and in Newtown, Conn. in 2012 have nothing to do with any of those.

If the alternative is waiting for President Donald Trump to keep his promise to stamp out mental illness, conclusions are obvious.

Trump pledges to make schools more secure in wake of shooting

That means reviving the assault-weapon ban that the country had from 1994 to 2004, while accepting most of the counterrevolution on gun rights of the last 20 years. God bless ‘em, some folks want to openly pack heat when they go to that dangerous Chipotle on the corner, lettin’ you know this here burrito’s off limits! Let ‘em. They’re not the problem.

Let’s be honest about a few things.

First, standing up for assault weapons isn’t conservative. The conservatism of Edmund Burke was a call for progress slowed down and modified by humility about how well society can anticipate the unanticipated consequences of well-intended reform, and a healthy respect for society’s traditions. The demand for absolute protection of weapons that didn’t exist when the Second Amendment to the Constitution was written simply is not conservative. It neither conforms to tradition nor respects society’s interests and traditions, as real conservatism does.

Second, the Founding Fathers never anticipated assault weapons, or allowed the purpose true gun nuts say they should serve.

When the Second Amendment was written, weaponry’s state of the art was muskets that took as long as a minute to reload after each shot. An AR-15 can fire an estimated 90 rounds a minute, though some estimates are lower. Add a cheap “bump stock” to make the semiautomatic weapon fully automatic, and it goes into hundreds of rounds a minute.

So an AR-15 is useful for hunting (a purpose anticipated in 1789) only if you’re planning to shred carne asada on the hoof, and essential for home protection only when you’re burgled by a gang of about 90 thieves. For those tasks, other guns will do - and liberals should leave folks to it.

How the Florida school shooting unfolded

Assault weapons are good for one thing unique to their technology — shooting lots of people in a short time, which is just about always illegal. And we can dismiss the true right-wing nut argument for legalizing military-style assault rifles in half a sentence: If you’re stockpiling military weapons to resist or overthrow the government, thinking you’re Sam Adams & Co., you’re a traitor. This was settled by George Washington, who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, and Abe Lincoln, progenitor of the War of Northern Aggression.

Third, mental health isn’t the issue in mass shootings, as Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio argue. We tolerate more than 10,000 gun homicides yearly in the U.S., and even more suicides, many committed by people with mental disorders. What we can’t tolerate are incidents where that mentally ill person can shoot 900 others, as the Las Vegas shooter did, in a few minutes before police arrive. Mental illness doesn’t let you do that. Uniquely powerful guns do.

Even high school kids hiding in closets know this.

Can Congress long ignore the voices of the kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High? The National Rifle Association may try to muffle their voices, but, as is often the case, Jesus Christ said it best: Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto you, Representatives and Senators. For the path back to Congress is controlled by such as these.

Now read:10 steps schools, parents and communities can take now to prevent more school shootings