The high point of my long-ago coaching career came one afternoon 26 autumns ago, when the junior varsity boys soccer team I was running defeated a squad from a neighboring high school 1-0. It was the visitors’ first loss in five years. That game came to mind last Friday when I learned of the horrific scenario that had unfolded earlier that day at an elementary school in the state where I grew up. The team whose five-year winning streak we snapped nearly half my life ago was from Newtown High School.

Newtown, Conn. in 1986 was chillingly similar in many ways to the Maine town where I reside today, and to the one in which I currently work. Equal parts suburban and rural, the community was largely homogeneous racially and ethnically, but more importantly it was taken for granted that it was safe. People of different races, ethnicities or religions (assuming you could find any) were looked upon with curiosity rather than suspicion. Violent crime happened in places which were distant both geographically and socio-economically. Odd young men who didn’t fit in socially were, when their existence was acknowledged, either pitied or dismissed as eccentrics. They certainly weren’t seen as potential mass murderers.

Friday’s events at Sandy Hook Elementary School confirm that it’s not 1986 anymore in Connecticut, Maine or anywhere else in the United States. Disturbed people have been around since the dawn of recorded history; what exactly caused Adam Lanza to obey impulses that compelled him to snuff out 28 lives (including his own) will probably never be fully known. But events like the one that shook Newtown last Friday morning happen far more often in America than they do in the rest of the developed world’s nations combined. Might some (though not all) such lethal maelstroms be prevented if weapons capable of killing people both quickly and efficiently weren’t quite so readily accessible?

But why are such high-tech killing machines so easily obtainable?

One contributing factor is a ubiquitous, shrill, deep-pocketed gun lobby that has demonized or drowned out any and all voices advocating for tighter controls on who may legally sell, purchase or own virtually any type of firearm in America.

Exhibit A: Within hours of the tragic events in Newtown that left 20 first-graders and six school employees dead, Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, issued the following statement:

“Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones. The only thing accomplished by gun-free zones is to ensure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun.”

Got that? It’s people who pass laws that make purchasing firearms more difficult who are responsible for the Newtown slaughter. If only those teachers had been packing heat, all of this could have been averted.

Mr. Pratt wasn’t the only one turning rational thought on its head. Former Arkansas governor (and one-time presidential aspirant) Mike Huckabee commented, “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” In other words, don’t waste your breath on the NRA; it’s those atheists and the ACLU who caused the latest gun-related tragedy.

Existing laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of individuals who are irresponsible, combustible, mentally unstable, socially or professionally unfulfilled, or some combination of all those factors clearly aren’t working. On top of that, America’s “entertainment” industry has for decades generated massive revenue by selling violence and murder as entertainment on TV and in theaters. More recently, video games that graphically portray firearm-related horrific acts are numbing a whole new generation to violence while simultaneously generating oodles of revenue for a still-growing industry in which having an active conscience or exercising good judgment seemingly puts one at a disadvantage.

For those both here and abroad currently making their living designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling firearms, every day is a holiday. Their polished, efficient lobbyists turn out incessant, brutally effective propaganda that helps to create an increasingly paranoid population that inexplicably and counter-intuitively reacts to each mass shooting by purchasing more firearms. Mix that with corporate greed and cowering, spineless politicians, neither of which are ever in short supply in America, and it’s a veritable “perfect storm.”

Until action replaces talk, the “hits” for America’s firearms industry will keep on coming. Their profits will go on rising nearly as quickly as innocent victims of gun violence keep on falling.

— Andy Young grew up in Easton, Conn., a 20-minute drive from Newtown. He currently teaches high school English in York County.