Col, I understand your statement. It seems to you that the USA is somehow broken, and you could be right. But how quickly we forget a little bit of reality about the wonderful (?) creature that is Man. When we want something, we will move Heaven, Hell, and large portions of Earth to get it.
In 1918 the USA passed an amendment to our Constitution that prohibited manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. That lasted maybe three years and some months before it got repealed. In the interim, "speak-easy" bars sprang up in basements.
We have had a "war on drugs" for 20+ years, but that stuff flows into the country worse now than they have in years. We just learned of another drug tunnel under the USA border from Mexico. A recent boatload of refugees set adrift by a storm in the Caribbean turned out to be smuggling more than people because the US Coast Guard found three different kinds of drugs in the boat as well.
We long ago outlawed marijuana but it looks like that prohibition is going away. It is sold openly in some shops in several states. Some states are legalizing it for medicinal purposes. Some have even passed it for recreation.
People are trying to prevent abortions, forgetting their history. Before Roe v. Wade decision tried to unify the law on that topic, it was in the realm of States' Rights. Some states had outlawed abortions - but they were still performed. Despite many societal admonitions against it, it is still possible to procure an abortion.
History is literally strewn with failed good intentions to curb what someone thinks is bad behavior. The point I'm trying to make is that individuals get what they want, law be damned, and if they want it bad enough, cost be damned. When Man becomes determined, no barrier will withstand for long. Man will find a way.
Taking guns away from people is not the solution it would initially seem to be. Because what you would do is take guns away from law-abiding people. The ones who don't care about a particular law would still have them, but the honest people would suddenly be helpless. Do you want to ask someone from the Ukraine about civilian gun control right now? Yes, it is an extreme case - but a perfect example of why you need to have an armed populous.
From what I understand, MOST of the gun violence in schools isn't perpetrated by a band of foreign terrorists seeking to make some political statement. It is the result of rage caused by bullying and ostracism that creates disaffected children. We don't have good tools to give us insight in how to help kids get socially adjusted. The Uvalde, Texas shooter rather obviously had a lot of rage and acted on it. The officers who finally stopped him had to do so lethally, so we cannot ask him why he did it. From what we have heard on our USA-based news shows, the young man was over 18 and had not drawn any attention to himself with respect to law enforcement. The time to do something about his rage was years ago, but we don't have ways to recognize that rage when it starts to manifest.
I'm sad that for the Buffalo, New York shooter, there was an interval of about 30 minutes between the time he online-posted his statement of intent and when he actually carried out his rampage. Too many people should have seen that and notified police. They could have had a unit there BEFORE the event. The Uvalde shooter was different in that the school district had armed officers on campus but they got shot first before he entered the school. But the whole incident lasted about 4 minutes according to the report given by a Texas law enforcement official. As bad as it was, if there had been a slower response, just ask yourself how many more would have died? I hate to think of the need to "armor" a school, but that might be what it takes.
Why does it keep happening? Because too many folks worry about whether we used the most humane way to treat the miscreant. I'm not a fan of summary execution, but if you are a cop responding to an "Officer needs assistance" call and you are under fire from automatic weapons, I'm not sure if you would have the time or the patience to switch to non-lethal rounds. We are hearing calls to take away guns, to take away drugs, to do all sorts of things - none of which have worked long-term in the past. How about trying to find the causative factors and address them rather than just having to shoot some angry kid every time?
Col, I hear you. I hope you can hear me. People have been killing other people ever since the invention of weapons by Unngh the caveman. Let's see if we can figure out why the killing persists and address THAT problem. The Uvalde shooting wasn't racist because many of the kids and the shooter were of the same general Hispanic ethnicity. I doubt it was political because elementary-school kids aren't usually political. It doesn't look like a personal revenge action though it might be an act of societal revenge. Too many chances for speculation right now, so let's just say we haven't figured out this one yet. Let's just hope we can learn something useful from it.