What wouldn’t you do to get back one of the children slain last week in their picture-perfect elementary school in Newtown, Conn.? Nothing that I can think of.

But nothing is what we’ve done to keep tragedies like this from happening — even after fair warning that they would.

After the shooting, we all rally to cope, and not just with flowers and stuffed animals. Funeral directors were flocking to Newtown with their hearses: There aren’t enough of them there for 27 funerals in one week.

Last Sunday, President Barack Obama came to Newtown in his all-too-familiar role as mourner in chief; as he noted, “This is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings.” Even when one of its own members hobbled into the well of the House, her brain split apart by bullets, still Congress did nothing.

Like many Democrats, the president has mostly taken a pass on gun control. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, as Washington officials often do, that the day of a massacre was “not the day to engage in the usual Washington policy debate.” By Sunday night, apparently, it was, though Obama didn’t get specific; he could barely get through the names of the 20 children who were killed.

“Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” he asked. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

The shorter, more depressing answer is yes, we have been prepared to say that. The longer, more hopeful answer is maybe we no longer are.

There are still some politicians who won’t tolerate even the mention of the idea of “gun safety,” the phrase gun-control advocates use in hopes of having a conversation with Second Amendment absolutists who believe everyone has the right to carry 100-round magazine clips. Take away my Uzi, goes the argument, and pretty soon I’ll be without a rifle to shoot deer.

Politicians aren’t worried about hunters. They’re worried about the National Rifle Association, which has the fundraising and advertising power to defeat them. So we have Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas, a Republican, saying we need more guns, while in Michigan legislation that would have allowed guns in day-care centers made it all to the way to Gov. Rick Snyder’s desk. (He vetoed it.)

The idea is that, had a teacher in Newtown been armed — wearing a holster with a six-shooter, perhaps, or hiding a Bushmaster under her desk? — we would be mourning fewer children.

It’s a ludicrous solution, arming everyone as if this were the Old West. There are more gun shops in the United States than there are Starbucks. More people die by gunfire in the U.S. than in any other country.

Yet the NRA continues to get its way, in the states and with Congress. That’s why the assault-weapon ban lapses. That’s why there isn’t a law that would ban weapons that can shoot 100 bullets without reloading. That’s why the U.S. attorney general doesn’t have the power to keep people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons.

In Washington, we live among cowards who believe that if we can’t solve the whole problem, we won’t solve any of it. True, it’s hard to stop crazy people with guns. But what about crazy people at the NRA?