Two Sundays ago, I walked out of the airport terminal in Boise and stopped to gawk at the sticker on an entrance door. Illustrated with a picture of an anxious cartoon handgun, it warned travelers of the mininum $3,920 fine waiting if they tried to take a firearm through security. Then I saw a second sign with the same message on the doors leading from a parking garage to the terminal.

But on that afternoon, the apparent need for such a reminder represented one of the smallest parts of America’s gun problem.

Two Sundays ago, it had only been a day since a deranged 18-year-old excuse for a man had shot and killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. I spent the next seven days driving through the Pacific Northwest as part of PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks drive testing, then flew home Monday. A day later, a deranged 18-year-old excuse for a man shot and killed 19 grade-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex.

This sickening repeat led to a predictably sickening response by elected officials, most but not all Republican, that amounted to this: Whatever we do can’t touch our peculiar institution of massively distributed gun ownership.

It’s fair to point to the conduct of the local police in Uvalde–their inaction left children only a little younger than my own dying in their hour of need. But this spasm of whataboutism has also led to politicians endorsing things like rebuilding schools along the lines of prisons (presumably, the rest of us remain free to get shot elsewhere) and improving mental-health care (which would be more persuasive were it not coming from politicians who spent years trying to kill the Affordable Care Act without serious plans to replace it), and anything else but the public-health issues of what guns are on the market, how they are sold and transferred, and who winds up carrying them.

The Second Amendment’s two-part phrasing allows multiple readings, but the last time the Supreme Court pondered it and perceived an individual right to gun ownership, it still saw no absolutes.

“It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” 

Which brings me back to my first setting. Flying from D.C. to Boise via Chicago treated me to the safest way to travel–made so because the culture of safety in commercial aviation doesn’t accept excuses like “the risk is somebody else’s fault” or “this is how we’ve always done it” or “individual passengers can make their own decisions.” Many other parts of American life could use something like that culture of safety, but none more than the manufacture and distribution of devices expressly made to kill people.