While Republican opposition to requiring criminal and mental health background checks for all firearms purchases, trades, and gifts is disgraceful, Democratic advocacy of such checks is cynical and pathetic. For the latest mass shooting, at the community college in Oregon, demonstrates, as was demonstrated by the mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown three years ago, that more gun control won’t accomplish enough.

In Oregon as in Newtown, the guns involved were legal and had been purchased legally and the perpetrators had no criminal or psychiatric commitment records. That is, the country is not just full of guns — an estimated 300 million in private hands — and not just full of psychotics, but full of psychotics who won’t be deterred by any legislation yet seriously proposed.

While gun-control advocates acknowledge that the country needs better access to mental health therapy, such therapy didn’t do much for the perpetrator in Newtown, and the perpetrator in Oregon was never regarded as anything worse than a loner. Can any decent government require loners to get psychiatric treatment?

Further, background checks don’t always work. They are vulnerable to the ordinary errors common in a multi-tiered system of government. Because of his recent drug arrest, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in June in Charleston, South Carolina, might have been disqualified from buying the gun he used. But the arrest was incorrectly entered in South Carolina criminal records and then the FBI, conducting the background check, called the wrong agency to inquire about the arrest. The background check failed.

Sensational as mass shootings are, most gun crimes arise from drug criminalization and the social disintegration caused by welfare policy. The context of mass shootings is a culture in which most mass entertainment involves not just gunplay but even grotesque and horrific violence. If life imitates art, it’s little wonder that the country and particularly its impoverished cities increasingly resemble scenes from the zombie movies and television programs that have become so sickeningly popular.

Meanwhile the country is also full of “soft” targets like schools, many of them proclaimed to be “gun-free zones,” as if the psychotics or ordinary criminals pay any more attention to such zones than drug dealers pay to “drug-free zones” around schools.

Yes, enact national background check requirements for gun possession, and even for ammunition. Some psychotics and criminals will be deterred. But with an estimated 300 million guns already in circulation, most psychotics and people bent on crime still won’t be. Jurisdictions with the strictest gun-control laws, like anarchic and bloody Chicago, will continue to prove that the bigger part of the gun problem is not lack of gun control but social disintegration, which is exactly what politicians don’t want to discuss, since it impugns everything about the irrelevant ideologies of both parties.

That leaves gun confiscation, which won’t happen without a strong majority for repeal of the Second Amendment, or new mechanisms for protecting the “soft” targets.

Quite on its own, independent of the influence of the National Rifle Association, Newtown responded to its massacre by putting armed guards at its schools, and few advocates of gun control have dared to tell the town that it was wrong. So what about more police?

That is, what about what the Second Amendment calls “a well-regulated militia” — a police auxiliary of hundreds of thousands of civilian volunteers studied for mental stability, trained in firearms use and safety, authorized to carry concealed guns in their daily lives, and sworn to be ready to use them against the attack of the next psychotic?

It’s an unpleasant thought, but not as unpleasant as the reality: a country full of psychotics.