The Republican presidential candidates were quick to offer sympathy but little else to the nation, to the grieving families and to the terrified town where the latest in American gun carnage took 10 lives on Thursday at an Oregon community college.

“We have to really get to the bottom of it,” Donald Trump, usually the most voluble candidate in offering quick-fix certainty about national challenges, told The Washington Post. “It’s so hard to even talk about these things.”

Now, as the presidential campaigns intensify, is precisely the time that he and the other candidates must talk about these things — about the horrendous toll the mass shootings have inflicted on the nation, with no end in sight. Like other Republican politicians, and many Democrats, too, Mr. Trump simplistically narrowed the topic of the gun massacre to “another mental health problem.”

This has become the standard political line, particularly among Republicans, for ducking the crucial fact that easy access to powerful arsenals — the Oregon murderer reportedly had 13 firearms, six of which he brought with him — is the great modern enabler for individuals, mentally ill or not, to massacre the innocent in shooting sprees.