I don’t quite know what Jeb Bush had in mind when he said that “stuff happens” in response to the mass shooting at an Oregon community college that left nine dead and several injured, after a gunman who had legally acquired 14 firearms, six of which he kept at Umpqua Community College, unleashed fire.

But what happens when the president takes to the podium for the 15th time in his presidency to address gun violence? As The Washington Post reported, if we define a “mass shooting” as an incident in which four or more people are killed, there hasn’t been a calendar week free of mass shootings in Obama’s second term.

For Republican presidential hopefuls, little, if anything, has changed when it comes to gun control. Donald Trump promoted his own unique brand of “guns, no guns — it doesn’t matter” approach, telling ABC News, “This isn’t guns this is about really mental illness.” Ben Carson similarly said, “The issue is the mentality of these people,” during an interview with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt. Mike Huckabee argued, “It was a cop with a gun that stopped him” about a day before a medical examiner ruled that the gunman had killed himself (incidentally, Huckabee criticized Obama’s “political pronouncement” as “at best premature and at worst ignorantly inflammatory”).

Attempts have been made, including two bills that failed to pass the Senate following the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in December 2012. Manchin-Toomey attempted to expand background checks. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, attempted to renew the assaults-weapon ban. Both failed in Congress, falling victim to familiar rhetoric best embodied by Senator Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, who told The New York Times in 2013, “Criminals do not submit to background checks now,” and, “They will not submit to expanded background checks.”

The narrative in days following the Oregon tragedy has taken a familiar tone, mostly in which politicians attempt to orient the issue away from gun control and toward mental illness (a justification that usually accompanies a white shooter). But this contradicts reviews of academic literature correlating gun ownership and homicide and reports suggesting a misguided localization of gun violence on mental illness.

In polls conducted after the Newtown shooting, the American public was generally more sympathetic to gun-control measures. But as the headlines faded away, so too did the public’s support for political measures against gun violence. This is exactly what Obama had in mind when he castigated Congress and the entire American political system for numbness toward mass shootings. We turn a blind eye to the well-known loopholes in gun ownership laws that allow the mentally ill to acquire firearms, like the one that allowed one man to shoot up a black church in Charleston and another to murder two women at a Louisiana movie theater.

The United States passes through this cycle every few months while the American fetishization of the firearm remains as unchanged as the sanctity of the Second Amendment. If you recall how some people in Newtown, Connecticut, reacted to the shooting at Sandy Hook, it was to buy more guns for protection in a panic over future regulations. The Oregon sheriff, now catapulted to national attention, once wrote a letter to Joe Biden pushing against gun control with all of the familiar arguments. In it he quotes a statement made by Sheriff Tim Mueller, writing: “We are Americans. We must not allow, nor shall we tolerate, the actions of criminals, no matter how heinous the crimes, to prompt politicians to enact laws that will infringe upon the liberties of responsible citizens who have broken no laws.”

This fetishization is deep, and the issue is not always partisan. The ban on federal research into gun violence has been renewed for nearly 20 years under both Democratic and Republican majorities. All the while, the gun industry channels tens of millions of dollars into the NRA each year, while the NRA and its affiliates spent nearly $1 million on political contributions and more than $3 million on lobbying in 2014. The NRA is also the organization that said eight victims of the Charleston shooting “might be alive” if they were allowed to carry handguns.

The issues are deep, and all of this talk unfortunately ignores inner-city gun violence and cyclical systems of poverty and mass incarceration that perpetuate violent crime. With all of these factors at play, we should look ahead to the next election for candidates willing to work toward a comprehensive approach to gun violence. “Our prayers are not enough,” Obama cautioned. “This is something we should politicize.” It’s certainly been long enough.

Alex Daly is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.