The shootings at the elementary schools in Newtown, Connecticut, and Uvalde, Texas, have outsized purchase in the minds of Americans and Texans—and for good reason. The victims were mostly little kids. Even if you aren’t a parent, you were a child once, and with that experience in hand, it’s not too hard to imagine the terror of being hunted by a gunman and realizing the adults around you can’t do anything about it.

But the mass shooting in October 2017 in Las Vegas is perhaps a better expression of the dull, banal horror of spree violence in the United States. School shootings can only happen to those who go to school or work there. In Las Vegas, a deranged real estate investor and gambler took up a sniper’s perch at the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino and stuck a Do Not Disturb hanger on his door. In his luggage he had 24 guns, mostly AR-10 and AR-15 rifles that he had legally obtained, kitted out with high-powered scopes and high-capacity magazines. That was not even the end of the weapons he was able to legally acquire: he’d packed his vehicle outside the hotel with two kinds of explosives, along with 1,600 rounds of ammunition he didn’t get a chance to use. He broke one of the windows in his hotel room with a hammerlike device and fired more than a thousand rounds at an open-air concert across the street before killing himself. It was an unimaginably chaotic night. Officially, 60 died and some 867 were injured. 

The Las Vegas shooting serves as a lesson not only because of its incredible scale, but because of the way it challenges some of the more pat arguments about addressing gun violence in America. The shooter had no particular red flags that would have shown up in background checks: he became a threat when he started shooting. A greater police presence at the festival or even on the Strip wouldn’t have helped either: first responders could not identify where the shots were coming from until it was far too late. Nor would good citizens with guns have made much of a difference, because the shooter was firing projectiles from more than a thousand feet away.

The only solutions that would have prevented deaths were those preventing anyone from becoming as well armed as Paddock was. Any law that had reduced the remarkable assemblage of equipment the shooter gathered would probably have lowered his body count. He needed many rifles, a lot of ammunition, top-tier scopes, and weapons modifications to create the carnage he did. Politicians could consider, in other words, any number of public policy fixes, and there was, for a brief time, demand to do something. 

What happened next is instructive. At the time, other minor gun control proposals, such as raising the age to purchase an assault rifle—not a factor in Las Vegas, but a factor in other shootings that year—were widely understood to be dead on the table. Instead the debate settled on one modification the Mandalay Bay shooter used, the bump stock. The device turns a semiautomatic weapon, which shoots one round at a time, into a weapon that can fire continuously. Leading the crusade against bump stocks was an unlikely figure—Texas senator John Cornyn, a Republican. “I know of no sportsman—no hunter—who uses a bump stock,” said Cornyn on the floor of the Senate in 2017. Hunters want to kill precisely, and mass shooters want to kill a lot.

Bump stocks were not the most important component of the Las Vegas shooting—a lack of them would simply have required the shooter to pull the trigger more. But they provided the most expedient fix. The purpose of bump stocks was clearly to circumvent the existing federal law against automatic weapons—the devices were hard to defend, even for pro-gun groups at the time. Cornyn basked in bipartisan praise for being willing to Do Something, while observers marveled that Congress might finally pass a bill strengthening federal gun laws after years of doing nothing or weakening them.

But even though there wasn’t a great appetite among pro-gun groups to defend bump stocks, which they tended to deride as a novelty, they didn’t want Congress passing any kind of gun law. If it passed one, even a very small one, that might open the door to others. Meanwhile, the Trump administration worried about what passing gun regulations might do to Republican Party unity in Congress. Instead of opening up a potentially difficult debate and forcing a vote that could be used against party members, the Trump administration passed a rule to ban bump stocks through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, arguing that they made a weapon automatic—a class of weapon already illegal under federal law. This rule stood for a few years until, last week, the Supreme Court overturned it in a 6–3 decision.

Michael Cargill, one of the most remarkable Texans now living—a gay, Black Republican gun-store owner in Austin—brought the case, supported by right-wing legal groups. They didn’t defend the devices—say, by addressing Cornyn’s point about their level of usefulness to hunters—but rather argued that the ATF didn’t have the authority to make the rule and that a bump stock doesn’t make a weapon fully automatic under the law. In a majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed, writing that a ban on bump stocks would have needed to come from Congress, not some bureaucrats. In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to invite lawmakers to revisit the issue. There is a “simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he said. “Congress can amend the law.”

On the merits, the question of the ATF’s rule-making authority can be argued. But focus only on the merits and you miss the broader context, which is more important. In 2017 and 2018, Americans exerted political pressure to regulate guns. That push took an emaciated form in the shape of a crusade against bump stocks—a partial measure—which seemed, for the first time, politically viable.

In the end, nearly everyone got what they wanted. A Texan championed a bump stock ban, but then folks were happy to let the Trump administration actually enact one, because why bother? A few years went by, and another Texan killed that rule with a test case. The matter has been kicked back to Congress. While Democrats in the Senate seem poised to pass a ban, Republicans in the House are going to block it. It’s an election year, and many voters have forgotten what a bump stock is, if they ever knew in the first place.

It’s a perfect wheel of futility. The dominant forces in America’s gun debate frame their efforts around defraying the anger that results from the last mass shooting. Everyone played their part quite well here.