Some Americans gasped publicly after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which killed nineteen children and two adults.

"What are you doing here?" Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy asked his colleagues in a speech before the Senate that was widely shared on social media.

"Why are you going to all this trouble to get this job, to put yourself in a position of authority, when you're doing nothing while our kids are running for their lives?"

The Houston Chronicle, in an angry editorial, called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's words - "Never Again!" - a "shameless lie";

the extremely lax gun laws in Texas, which even meet with opposition from police chiefs and gun safety trainers, are also his work.

"Don't just sit there and say: My God, I can't find the words!", the paper addresses to its readers: "Of course you have them.

Go vote.

Go fight.

It doesn't need more words."

Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor in Texas, confronted Republican Greg Abbott at a news conference about the massacre.

"It's your fault!

It's all so predictable!” said O'Rourke before being escorted out of the room to abuse from the notables on the podium, including the Mayor of Uvalde.

Even in the sports world, the words were clear: "I'm fed up with letters of condolence and minutes of silence!" shouted basketball coach Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors at a press conference where he declined to speak about basketball.

"It is enough!

When are we going to do something?"

Well-intentioned but meaningless rituals

But in all the anger there is less a determination to stop the horror than helpless desperation.

In the New York Times podcast The Daily, journalist Elizabeth Williamson, who wrote a book on the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre a decade ago, laments that there is "a growing community in this country of parents who who lost their children in school massacres” and had to support each other.

Once again, well-intentioned but meaningless rituals are observed "because people don't know what else to do given the fact that we as a nation have not taken any concrete measures".

The Washington Post also sees no light at the end of the tunnel.

"Why nothing will change after Uvalde," says an editorial.

In America, priority is always given to those “whose fears about the right of others to go on with their lives prevail.”

America is not the land of the brave and free, but of the fearful and imprisoned.

And to make the fearful feel safe, the rest is left for the slaughterhouse. "The debate is tedious and crippling," finds New York Magazine, "because it seems so little can be done." The New Yorker “ is reminiscent of a fantasy by the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

He once imagined what would happen if the parents of Sandy Hook victims leaked pictures of the bloodbath in the classroom to the media.