Richard Martinez has a message for the politicians who have been calling to express condolences on the death of his son, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, in the massacre of six people in Isla Vista, Calif., on Friday: “I don’t care about your sympathy,” he said. “Get to work and do something.”

Through his tears, he called lawmakers in Washington “a rudderless bunch of idiots” for bowing to the National Rifle Association and refusing to enact restrictions that might have kept three semiautomatic handguns away from the deranged shooter, Elliot Rodger. “These people are getting rich sitting in Congress,” he said. “And what do they do? They don’t take care of our kids.”

In being bullied by the gun industry into rejecting one of the most effective ways of limiting the proliferation of guns — universal background checks — members of Congress have become complicit in shootings by anyone who should not be allowed to own a gun because of a criminal or mental health record. It is not just the mass shootings like the one in California that the nation needs to focus on (victims in these horrific events make up less than 1 percent of all gun homicides), but also the more than 11,000 individual deaths from gun violence every year, most of which get no attention, or the more than 19,000 annual suicides by gun.

The background check bill failed in the Senate a year ago, mostly because of Republican opposition. The gun lobby, determined to prevent a single restriction from being approved, spread vicious misinformation about the creation of a gun registry that left lawmakers quaking and raised ludicrous fears of government confiscation.