Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Tears rolled down his face. His voice displayed a mixture of anger, sadness, disappointment and, more than anything, determination. "First graders in Newtown. First graders. Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad," he told the audience. This was Barack Obama, the president of the US, during an emotional speech last Tuesday, in which he recalled the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that claimed the lives of 20 children and six school employees. It was the emotional backdrop to his unveiling of executive orders aimed at curbing gun violence.

Since the December 2012 atrocity, more than 90,000 Americans have died as a result of gun violence, and there have been more than 1,000 mass shootings in the US (defined as incidents in which at least four people were shot), stats that make the US the most deadly developed nation on earth for gun violence. "We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency ... somehow we've become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal," said a bitter president.

But the solutions that Obama proposed immediately got shot down by gun rights groups. "Obama's executive orders will do nothing to improve public safety," declared the National Rifle Association on Twitter. And Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who is seeking the Republican nomination to be the party's presidential candidate in November, claimed on his campaign website: "Obama wants your guns."

None of this is surprising. Indeed, it feels like déjà vu. Gun violence is such an acute yet long-lasting disease in this country. The president's solution, which mainly focuses on mandatory background checks for gun buyers, have been discussed for years. Every time such a solution is proposed, the die-hard gatekeepers for gun rights always allege it is a public war against the constitution and, in particular, the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Every time the debate heads to an impasse in which there is no winner. The only difference this time is that we now know that even tears from the president are not enough to awaken common sense in many people, and certainly not enough to soften some impenetrable hearts.

What worries me is that the sophistries the gun rights side have adopted to make their case may be more harmful than they may first appear.

On the one hand, a lot of their arguments are tired and easy to rebut. For example, gun rights supporters claim gun control laws won't make the country safer because criminals never abide by the law. Well, that's a dilemma anyone enacting a law faces but that isn't a reason no to make laws.

The others are trickier. For example, gun rights backers claim more people having guns will only make us safer because bad people can be stopped immediately before they can cause further damage. It is almost impossible to test this theory; it is not as if you can put one shooter in a movie house with no one else carrying a gun and one in the next door theater where everyone has a gun to see what happens. I worry that more people would be killed by the people trying to help than by the gunman.

Still, when sophistries like this are repeated, it does win over some people. After the Sandy Hook horror three years ago, I talked to a Chinese engineer who lived in the area. He was clearly shocked by the bloodshed in the quiet and peaceful town he now called home, and was struggling with whether and how to tell the story to his second grade son, who studied in a school near the targeted one. But he told me he had become a supporter of the NRA because he believed that if the teachers of that school all had guns, the evil could have been thwarted.

Maybe he was right given the circumstances in that mass shooting. But in other situations I just wouldn't buy it.

Not long ago, on a flight I took during my vacation, a large old man sat across the aisle from me suddenly stood up. He pulled out something that looked like a rifle from under his seat, placed his hand on the top and turned to me in the aisle. I am sure my heart skipped at least one beat before I realized he was disabled and the stick in his hand was nothing but a cane.

In a cold sweat, I thanked God, a.k.a. the Transportation Security Administration, for not believing that more people carry guns on flights would make trips safer.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com