French spoke for many conservative lawmakers when he concluded that new gun-control laws would not have prevented any of the mass shootings in recent memory: “Time and again, existing laws failed, or no proposed new gun-control law would have prevented the purchase,” he wrote. South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds echoed Trump, saying in an interview with NPR that the solution is not to ban a certain type of weapon, but to ensure that “dangerous people” can’t get into schools.

Florida Governor Rick Scott and Senator Marco Rubio—both of whom carry A+ ratings and endorsements from the N.R.A—leaned on similar, though less elegant talking points. “I think it’s important to know all of [the facts] before you jump to conclusions that there’s some law we could have passed that could have prevented it,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News in the shooting’s aftermath. He added that lawmakers “can always have that debate, but . . . you should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe [legislation].” (Over the course of his career, Rubio has received $3.3 million from the N.R.A.) Scott, too, has long bucked calls for gun control. After the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, the Florida governor infamously declared, “Let’s remember, the Second Amendment has been around for over 200 years. . . . That’s not what killed innocent people; evil killed innocent people.”

Democratic lawmakers, of course, called for just the opposite. “Another mass shooting. Reportedly another AR-15. My bill to ban assault weapons is ready for a vote,” Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote on Twitter, adding, “How long will we accept weapons of war being used to slaughter our children?” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who took office shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, said that Congress bears full responsibility for the deaths of the victims. “This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting . . . only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction,” he said. “We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

A third group has been almost equally vocal in its desire for increased gun control: survivors. “My message to lawmakers in Congress is please take action,” David Hogg, a student who witnessed the shooting, told CNN. “Any action at this point instead of just complete stagnancy and blaming the other side of the political aisle would be a step in the right direction.” Melissa Falkowski, a teacher at the high school who reportedly hid 19 students in a closet in her classroom, told CNN that “We did everything we were trained to do in active shooter drills, and still we had mass casualties. I blame our government for not keeping us safe.”

If the responses to recent shootings are any indication, their pleas will likely fall on deaf ears. Even a bipartisan effort to curb the sale of “bump stocks,” an attachment that enables a semiautomatic rifle to fire more rapidly, in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting where the gunman killed 58 people has largely stalled on the national level.