Democrats in Washington continued their calls for gun control reform Wednesday in the aftermath of a shooting at a Presbyterian private school in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this week that left three nine-year-olds and three staff members dead, the latest in the United States’ troubling history of school shootings targeting young children.

Their Republican colleagues largely offered their thoughts and prayers, focused on the country’s mental health crisis, zeroed in on the shooter’s gender identity, or, in the case of at least one Tennessee lawmaker, threw their hands up and said “we’re not gonna fix it.”

“Our children should not be forced to live in a war zone where bullets may murder a classmate at a moment’s notice. What will it take? How much blood must be spilt? How many children must be killed until we do the right thing?” asked Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., at a press conference held by House Democrats Wednesday. McBath lost her teenage son to gun violence in a 2012 shooting.

“Congress has lost its way. We have lost our soul,” McBath continued.

Specifically, House Democrats are calling for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

“There is no excuse to allow our streets to be flooded with weapons of war that are not being used to hunt deer, they’re being used to hunt human beings and to slaughter children,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the House minority leader.

At a separate press conference Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called for a slew of gun control regulations, including new legislation they plan to introduce that would provide consistent, long-term funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research gun violence. 

Between 1996 and 2018, the CDC was barred from researching gun violence. The ban was partially lifted in 2018, but research wasn’t funded until 2020.

“We must invest in this research,” Markey said. “Because by doing that, we will gain a better understanding of the root causes of gun violence and identify evidence based solutions in order to prevent it.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has yet to speak publicly or post on social media about the Nashville shooting. 

“We can talk about new movies, we can talk about your lives, we can talk about what you’re doing for Easter. Anything else,” McCarthy told reporters in audio shared by ABC News, declining to answer questions about Nashville. “I have to go to work right now.”

Other Republicans, including Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., immediately began discussing the Nashville shooter’s gender identity — police have said they identified the suspect as transgender — as the root cause of the violence.

“You want to know why the shooter is dead in Nashville? The trans shooter? You want to know why? Because a good guy with a gun killed that woman,” Greene said in a hearing Wednesday. “She identified as a man. She was mentally ill, probably taking hormones. And she went in and murdered children and adults in this Christian school.”

“If early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left,” Vance tweeted hours after the shooting. “Giving in to these ideas isn't compassion, it's dangerous.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also focused on the fact the school in Nashville, The Covenant School, was a Christian private school, calling for the shooting to be investigated as a federal hate crime.

“Hate that leads to violence must be condemned,” Hawley wrote in a letter to the FBI director and the homeland security secretary, calling for investigations into individuals who may have inspired the shooter. “Hate crimes must be prosecuted.”

The Nashville shooter cannot be prosecuted for any crime because they were shot and killed by police inside the school Monday morning. Police have released few details on the shooter’s gender identity and possible motives behind the attack, beyond the fact that they were previously a student at the school.

Other Republicans simply offered their thoughts and prayers, as politicians from both parties have done for decades now.

“The first thing in any kind of tragedy I do is I pray. I pray for the victims. I pray for their families,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., at a press conference Tuesday. “I really get angry when I see people trying to politicize it for their own personal agenda. It just seems like on the other side, all they want to do is take away the guns from law-abiding citizens.”

Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, is himself a victim of gun violence, having been one of the six people shot at a 2017 practice for the annual congressional baseball game.

“Why is it that when it comes to guns, Republicans throw their hands up and say ‘we can’t do anything, let’s continue to pray,’” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., at the House Democrats’ press conference. “As a person of faith, I believe in prayer. But we are also asked by God to take action.”

The Nashville shooting, in which the shooter used an AR-15-style rifle, came just over ten years after twenty children — all ages six or seven — and six adults were killed with an AR-15-style rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and just under a year since nineteen children — ages nine through 11 — and two teachers were killed with an AR-15-style rifle at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“They have on television now these emergency room doctors showing what happens when a bullet enters a body when it's from a revolver or from another gun. It goes in a straight line and goes out,”  President Joe Biden told reporters on the tarmac at a North Carolina airport Tuesday. “But what happens now with that assault weapon — with a AR-15 — it goes in the body and it explodes in the body, and it goes in at a significantly higher speed.”

A recent report from the Washington Post compared the damage of bullets fired from a handgun to those fired by an AR-15, creating 3D models of two school shooting victims — six-year-old Noah Pozner, who was murdered at Sandy Hook, and 15-year-old Peter Wang, who was killed in the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida — to show the devastation wrought on the human body from bullets fired from an AR-15.

According to Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, the bullets caused almost a “complete destruction” of Pozner’s lower lip and jaw, the Post reported. Four bullets “obliterated” Wang’s head, according to the article.

“How many more children have to be murdered in their classrooms before you’ll even contemplate banning assault weapons instead of books?” asked Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn. “Until they’re willing to stop kids from getting murdered in their classrooms, I don’t want to hear another damn word from them about keeping our schools or our communities safe. Not one more word.”

“We have failed my kids' generation in this country over the past 25 years. We cannot fail my grandson’s,” Craig added.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who told reporters Monday “we’re not gonna fix it” and "I don't see any real role that we could do other than mess things up,” participated in an interview with CBS News Tuesday and said the assault rifle ban being pushed by Biden and other Democrats was a nonstarter.

“The bad people have superior firepower right now, you see that all the time,” Burchett said in the interview. “To deny me that right as a law-abiding citizen, I have a real problem with that.”

Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., whose district includes the school where Monday’s shooting occurred, responded to criticism of his family’s 2021 Christmas card in which he and three other family members held rifles in front of a Christmas tree by telling a Sky News reporter “why would I regret taking a family photo with my family and exercising my constitutional rights?”

In a statement hours after the shooting, Ogles wrote he and his family were “sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.”