Roseburg, Ore. It’s one of those American places — Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino — now branded by a mass shooting. On Oct. 1, 2015, a 26-year-old shot and killed eight fellow students and a professor at the local community college. When the town’s name was still hot with grief, the watchword from the gun people was “politics.” No one was to talk about what might have prevented it.

It has been just like that this month. Two years to the day after Roseburg, a man killed 58 people and himself in Las Vegas. Again, the gun-rights lobby warned against speaking now, of all times, of the case for gun control. Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan ruled out action even on the “bump stocks” that the Las Vegas shooter used to make his semiautomatic rifles shoot like Tommy guns.

At Roseburg, someone did try raising the alarm earlier, much earlier in fact, early enough to have done some good.

On May 27, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, made the case right on the eve of that state’s primary for doing something about the ease with which people got guns. He was warned not to dare try it: The local sheriff said there would be hostile demonstrators facing him, knowing the personal interest he had in the subject.