By Jacquielynn Floyd

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — The big gun circus has been and gone now, with all the attendant shouting and theatrics, and now normal life can resume. If there was any substantive discussion on how we can have a calmer, more measured attitude toward deadly weapons and the role they play in our culture, it flew far beneath the radar.

The mega-hyped convocation of the National Rifle Association in Dallas provided a forum for hyperbolic rhetoric and exaggeration on all sides, which is about all that could be expected.

As entertaining as this was, recent events elsewhere have offered up more substantive — and more disturbing — evidence of just how far behind we are in even addressing, much less curbing, gun violence.

Over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Justice released fresh documents detailing the alarming history of the man who shot and killed 26 people to death during a church service in Sutherland Springs last fall.

Yes, one of the men who pursued the gunman was feted — and rightly so — at the NRA convention in Dallas. The chase ended when the killer, Devin Kelley, shot himself.

The Air Force has come under fire for failing to report details of Kelley’s 2012 domestic-violence conviction, which would have made him ineligible for legally purchasing the gun he used in the massacre.

Would that have stopped him? Hard to say. What’s really disturbing isn’t so much the bureaucratic incompetence, it’s that everybody — the Air Force, Kelley’s wife, even Kelley himself — recognized that he was dangerously violent and unlikely to change.

The Wall Street Journal reports that at the time of his 2012 court-martial, Kelley made a tearful video expressing regret for beating his toddler stepson so savagely that the child’s skull was cracked.

“This is not the last mistake, and there’s probably plenty to come, unfortunately,” Kelley said before the camera, with what now seems to be chilling prescience.

He’s a sub-archetype of the modern multiple murderer: The guy who everybody knew was dangerous, the guy who exhibited every “red flag” on the cheat sheet for easy identification of likely mass shooters. The guy everybody knew was impulsive, violent and drawn to weapons like a June bug to a porch light.

When everybody knows, or at least suspects, that this is that guy — why don’t we do more to intervene?

Well, we don’t lock people up for what they might do. There wouldn’t be enough jails and prisons in all the land if we did.

But if gun rights activists are serious in their insistence that the problem is mental health rather than guns, I’m ready to start hearing ideas: about research, about legislation, about how we can do a better job predicting future violence and how we can ensure that people who aren’t supposed to have access to guns don’t fall through the bureaucratic cracks.

The 29-year-old man who shot and killed four people in a Nashville Waffle House last month (before an unarmed hero wrenched his rifle away) was a walking sandwich board for “red flag” behavior: Violent, threatening, delusional. He voluntarily surrendered his guns after he was arrested for trying to crash the White House last summer.

Yet law enforcement seemed unclear on the protocol for what to do with the weapons, or for how to ensure they were kept from away from him. They turned the guns over to his father, who reportedly gave them back to his son, who used them for mass murder.

Last week, an 18-year-old resident of Fair Haven, Vt., walked out of jail after recording with detailed precision his plans to “kill as many as I can” in a bloody shooting attack on his former high school. He had told friends about his admiration for the Parkland, Fla., school shooter and for the architects of the Columbine massacre. He had dropped out of a residential program for treatment of anxiety and depression and had stopped taking his prescribed medication.

But the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the most serious charges against the man should be dropped: Thinking about, talking about and writing about a crime are not the same thing as actually committing a crime.

No, they are not. And our rights are precious to us (some more than others, depending on who you are): the right to possess firearms, the right to not be jailed for something somebody thinks you might do, the right to send your kid off to school with a reasonable degree of confidence that nobody is going to walk in the door and start shooting.

Waiting for the next mass shooting to parrot the same cliches has grown to be the biggest cliche of all. It is past time to invest research money — U.S. government dollars — into research efforts to predict and avert violence. We study everything else under the sun, but a generation of researchers has been scared off the topic by congressional discouragement.

There may be tracking and treatment programs that work — there probably are — but we don’t know what they are.

The counterproductive politics of mutual demonization — liberal “confiscators” vs. “gun nuts” — is all we get out of events like the Dallas convention. Sadly, it’s all we get when some misfit, some angry young man whose brain is crawling with violent fantasies, decides to establish a mass murder rep of his own.

We can’t prevent every killing, every suicide, every act of gun violence. But if we can’t even work on ways to deter the ones who virtually advertise their intentions before the fact, we’re past hope. There’s nothing left but the same old shouting and theatrics.