Like clockwork, before bodies reached room temperature, gun control advocates began calling on Congress to “do something” after last weekend’s church massacre in Texas. They also used the atrocity as yet another opportunity to denigrate people of faith and their expressions of faith — mocking the reality that even people who pray cannot convince God to stop the killing.

I won’t venture into how terrible it is to mock the sincere prayers of those seeking God’s influence in their lives, or the assumption that those who pray believe the effort to end these horrific events stops there. But I will venture into why these massacres keep happening in our culture. And it has very little to do with anything a new law could do about gun availability.

We have spent decades now, trying to convince “progressives” that fatherlessness has a price. That the exclusion of traditional moral teaching comes at a cost, and the inevitable deterioration of the sanctity of life in a pro-abortion society has far more than just prenatal consequences. And speaking of consequences, we’ve spent the better part of a generation now protecting kids from them with participation trophies and safe spaces. We conservatives have made the case, sometimes indelicately, that godlessness has disastrous consequences as we’ve learned from civilizations before us. Or even worse, using a defective belief in God as an excuse to kill one’s enemies.

There is no singular reason why Devin Patrick Kelley, Stephen Paddock, Dylann Roof, Jared Loughner or any of the others opened fire to maximize a body count. Like anything else, it’s truly complicated. What I do know, is that when cultures become unhealthy, life begins to mean less and less and less. Human beings become objects reduced to a label and the accompanying enmity produces a primal hatred that at times is sadly fatal.

Troubled childhoods. Mental illness. Psychoactive drugs gone wrong. Religious-ideological grooming. Social isolation. Instead of addressing this issue as if there’s only one problem driving it, or one measure that can be taken to stop it, how about a holistic approach? Of course we should keep guns out of the hands of those who are mentally ill or prone to violence. We have laws in place to address that. Another law added to four or five already broken isn’t going to do much, other than restrict the freedom of law-abiding folks.

I, along with other fans of the 2nd Amendment, take exception to the demand by gun control proponents that restricting the freedoms of all is the only way to stop these deaths. There’s also a troubling and unpopular reality that mass shootings really make up only a tiny sliver of homicides committed by a gun. But — and this is important — these are the only events that prompt a widespread discussion (I use that term loosely) about gun violence. Why in the world would we craft public policy to address gun violence using such exceptional scenarios? If we could end all mass shootings tomorrow, it would barely make a statistical dent in the nation’s challenges with gun violence.

While mass killings grip our emotions and our attention, and fuel an ongoing narrative the left tries using to impose more regulation, the overall problem of gun homicides has been in decline for the past couple of decades. In other words, you’re statistically as safe in a generic public space as you have likely been in your entire life.

And to the extent gun violence is happening, it’s not because of a deficiency in our laws. Many laws are just a last resort after the culture begins to fail us.

Associated Press award-winning columnist Neal Larson of Idaho Falls writes at www.neallarson.com. He is also the author of “Living in Spin.” He is a conservative talk show host on KID Newsradio 106.3 and 92.1, and also at www.kidnewsradio.com. “The Neal Larson Show” can be heard weekday mornings from 8:00 to 10:00. His email address is neal@590kid.com.