The trauma of mass gun violence — at least in places where mass gun violence has not become a terrible feature of daily life — is compounded today by the perfunctory ritual through which the arbiters of American discourse drag the rest of the country.

There are the reflexive calls for stricter gun-control laws without any understanding of whether those proposals would have had any effect on the course of the events that inspired them (and sometimes in the face of evidence that they would have no effect). There’s the mockery of the religiously observantfrom great institutional heights. And there’s …