It keeps happening, like a recurring nightmare — the same terrifying threats, followed by our same inability to preclude or escape them. Sunday morning, we woke up to learn of not one but two gruesome mass shootings — one here in the U.S. at Brown University, and one at Bondi Beach near Sydney, Australia. Their combined tally as of this writing is 17 dead and dozens wounded, some critically.

After one day of a steady stream of information about the shocking mass shooting in Australia, the government has already vowed to clamp down even more tightly on its already strict gun control.

But wait: Were this weekend’s events a new wave of mass shootings? Or are they part of a growing wave of lethal violence of all kinds — like the stabbing death Sunday of Rob Reiner and his wife, or the stabbing in Macy’s in New York City last week, or the Metro stabbing in Charlotte a few months ago? Or the hideously ugly recurrence of dousing victims with gasoline and setting them on fire, as in Chicago a week ago and on a New York City subway earlier this year?

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all part of the obviously increasing antisemitism spouting up in the U.S. and around the world — or more likely an example of nascent antisemitism coming out of the shadows, seen particularly on many college campuses in the past year.

Officials are still trying to get to the bottom of this weekend’s violence, but it seems pretty clear to me that we’re seeing all of the above, and that digging reflexively into the tiresome dry hole of gun control not only won’t help but is more likely to make things worse by distracting us from our deeper issue — which is that ours is a society becoming increasingly tolerant of violence of all kinds.

Keep in mind that Australia has for years been the gold standard for gun control. One of the standard rejoinders to those in the U.S. who resist excessive focus on gun control is the reminder of Australia’s widely applauded response to a mass shooting several decades ago. It launched an aggressive gun buyback program, in combination with substantially tougher nationwide restrictions on gun ownership.

That seemed to work quite well for many years, and it seemed to be a good fit for Australia’s generally more tranquil (compared to the turbulent U.S.) political environment. But it evidently did not prevent this weekend’s atrocity — and it’s likely that even stricter gun restrictions won’t either. Earlier reports indicate that the Bondi Beach shooting was antisemitic to the core and that the perpetrators were a father and son, both hunters and legal gun owners.

Here in the U.S., the Left’s instinctive inclination is to address gun violence with calls for additional gun restrictions. Unfortunately, it sometimes seeps beyond the Left. A month ago, in a column addressing the issue of increasing violence of all kinds, The Wall Street Journal’s eminent editorialist Peggy Noonan observed in passing that “surely, controlling the number of guns out there would help.”

Noonan is a brilliant writer, a deep thinker, a moderate conservative who doesn’t allow herself to get stuck in rabbit holes. Her commentary on political violence was balanced and constructive. But please, Peggy and company, do the math: how many fewer guns would it take to make a difference?

It’s generally estimated that there are over 400 million guns in the U.S., more than one per every American. Guns are simple and inexpensive to produce, and there’s a steady supply of them worldwide.

Would a very successful U.S. government buyback of 100,000 guns help? Or a spectacularly successful buyback of 10 million guns? Of course not. Neither would make a detectable dent in the U.S. gun inventory. Moreover, I’ve always been a believer in the logic that, by definition, criminals are not troubled in the least by laws prohibiting gun ownership. Would someone willing to commit murder be dissuaded by a measly little gun law?

The simple reality is that it only takes one gun — from the sea of hundreds of millions of those available — to mow down a classroom full of Brown University students preparing for an exam.

In my view, we are facing multidimensional issues and must therefore take multipath corrective actions:

1. First and foremost, we have a violence problem. We must recognize and acknowledge that it is a very real societal issue, that it includes propensity for and tolerance of violence of all kinds, and that it is growing, not shrinking. Among the keys to combating it are aggressive law enforcement, serious efforts to tone down political rhetoric, and efforts to rein in (how?) negative social media influences.

2. Regarding the constant threat of so-called “gun violence,” we must protect the vulnerable, particularly via effective control of access to schools, airports, and other places where people congregate.

3. Antisemitism is real. We must give it the same level of attention we apply to racism, sexism, and similar threats to subsets of our society.

4. We must identify, find, and remove illegal immigrants with demonstrated criminal associations or behavior (i.e., the worst of the worst).

Without question, the above are all uncomfortable responses for a free and peace-loving country such as ours — but all are viable, and all are needed to protect our citizens from those intent on doing harm.