Esther Lance, in pink, during a memorial marking one year after the Emanuel A.M.E. Church shooting. Lance’s mother, Ethel Lance, was killed. Photograph by Stephen B. Morton / The New York Times / Redux

Friday marks one year since nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, had welcomed the killer, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, into their bible study, and prayed with him, before he opened fire. After the massacre, the family members of the slain men and women, in the throes of unimaginable grief, offered radical forgiveness to Roof. “You took something very precious away from me,” one relative said, addressing Roof during a court hearing. “But I forgive you.”

At Reverend Pinckney’s funeral, President Obama delivered a stirring tribute, and called on the American public to not “slip into comfortable silence, once the eulogies have been delivered, once the television cameras are gone.” Most memorably, Obama sang “Amazing Grace,” reminding Americans that “out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for He has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind…. He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find our best selves.”

This past weekend, another terrible tragedy struck, this time in Orlando. Like the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Pulse night club was a sanctuary for a community, violated by an act of hate. Coming so close to the one-year anniversary of Charleston, Orlando is a tragic and sobering reminder that we are still lost, and have yet to find those best selves.

How can we find our way? Efforts at gun control have stalled in Congress, and Americans have grown increasingly weary. Most Americans support measures like universal background checks, preventing people on the no-fly list from purchasing firearms, and bans on assault weapons. But despite the popularity of these proposals, and despite the fact that Americans are now as likely to die from a gunshot as they are to die in a car accident, politicians have refused to act.

On Tuesday night, Representative Jim Himes, of Connecticut, along with several other Democrats, walked out of the House of Representatives during a moment of silence for the Orlando victims. Silence, Himes argued, was not what the nation needed. “Screaming at painful volume the names of the forty-nine whose bodies were ripped apart in Orlando, and the previous victims and the ones before them” would be a much better way to honor the dead, Himes argued.

Our country needs changes, both cultural and legislative. We need to rewrite the messages of toxic masculinity and violence that boys and men receive. We need to close the loopholes that allow people who are intent on committing violence to purchase firearms quickly. And we need to stop confusing the protections guaranteed by the Second Amendment with an imagined right to own semi-automatic weapons designed to be used by the military.

After a mass shooting took place in Australia in 1996, the Australian government implemented background checks and a thirty-day waiting period to buy a gun. In the twenty years since, there has not been one mass shooting in the country, and the chances of being killed by a gun plummeted by seventy-two per cent. As President Obama bemoaned in a podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron three days after the Charleston massacre, “There is no other advanced nation on Earth that tolerates multiple shootings on a regular basis and considers it normal.” After Orlando, Obama once again asked Americans to consider if this is “the kind of country we want to be,” because “to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

A year after Charleston, we continue to seek that ever-elusive grace that Obama spoke and sang about in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church. As the historian Thomas Holt once wrote, “We must be able to imagine a different future if we are to be able to change the present and thus shape that future.” We have yet to act outside of the dominant ideas of our time.