America howls with pain after Texas. Yet again we ask: ‘When are we going to do something?’ | Emma Brockes

It's absurd that Joe Biden, the most powerful man in the world, cannot overturn the bizarre relationship between Americans and their guns

Texas." It was said with incredulity, by one parent to another, outside my children's school at pickup. On the east coast of the US on Tuesday night, where I live, the after-school clubs were letting out just as news of a mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, was unfolding. At that point, 14 children were confirmed dead, a number that has since risen to 21 children, and two teachers. Before the obscenity of it began to sink in, the shock: another massacre foretold, its sheer inevitability somehow deepening the horror. Other parents arrived, phones in hand, rattled and fighting off mental images. This fucking country."

Over the next 24 hours, the same questions, with the same answers, would roll around again: What has to happen?" In the 10 years since the Sandy Hook massacre, when 20 children and six educators were murdered in an elementary school in Connecticut - during which there have been, in the United States, hundreds of further school shootings, 27 this year alone - this question has attained a rhetorical force divorced from its actual utility. That the US is a country in which decisive political action to curb gun ownership will never follow a mass shooting requires, at this point, no further evidence.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist