THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

We mark our decline as a civilized nation by what steps we take after another commonplace shooting in the public arena. The latest, the Parkland Massacre, brings to Florida members of a support group for families of those gunned down by evil people clinging to their 2nd Amendment.

A child is shot to death. Maybe at school, maybe at the movies. It is all over TV, all over Twitter, just like the last mass shooting.

Then the cameras go away, and the parents are left in a wilderness of heartbreak. They do not know how to plan a funeral, where to get a therapist. They’re not aware that scammers will try to fund-raise off their grief, that conspiracy theorists will question their tragedy, or that — hard to believe — they might, eventually, be O.K.

But lots of people do know.

“When we had this happen to us, had our daughter slaughtered, we didn’t know what to do, or what was going to happen next,” said Sandy Phillips, whose 24-year-old daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was one of the 12 killed in the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo. in 2012. “We didn’t want to live. It was horrific. And nobody else understood, except other survivors.”

So it is that Ms. Phillips and her husband, Lonnie Phillips, are raising money to travel to Parkland, Fla., where the Phillipses will quietly let the families of 17 of America’s latest victims of mass gun violence know that they are there to listen, to advise, to hug, to cry, and, perhaps, to recruit them to the ranks of the most committed gun-control activists in the country.

The mass shootings of recent years, the proliferation of grief from rural Oregon to the tip of Florida, have forced hundreds of family members into an unwanted fellowship. Veterans like the Phillipses serve as guides in the immediate aftermath, introducing the bereaved of Sandy Hook to those of San Bernardino and the parents of Virginia Tech to those of Roseburg, in a loose but growing network.

Some mourn in private. Some confront politicians, join gun-control groups and flock to rallies. But whether they turn to advocacy or not, many gravitate toward one another, checking on each other by Facebook or phone whenever another gunman strikes.

In a gun-control debate that often splinters along ideological lines, no one speaks more powerfully than those who survived a high-profile shooting, or the families of those who did not. The power of their testimonials goes beyond their authenticity: They, unlike politicians and advocates, can usually avoid the accusation that they are politicizing a tragedy.

Recognizing the emotional heft of such stories, groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Everytown for Gun Safety often make themselves available to survivors and victims’ families in the aftermath of mass shootings, sometimes even paying for them to travel to meet other survivors and advocates or to attend rallies, hearings and meetings with politicians. Everytown, the group founded and funded by the former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, runs a network of about 1,500 family members and shooting survivors who are trained in activism, including many who were affected not by mass shootings but by the smaller ones that occur daily.

They join a long tradition of families who have turned private heartbreak into public advocacy. There is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which has successfully shifted public awareness around drunken driving and pushed for tougher laws. There is John Walsh, who became a well-known anti-crime TV personality after his son was kidnapped and killed. There are the parents of people killed by undocumented immigrants, who have seen their campaign against illegal immigration taken up by President Trump.

The difference is that mass-shooting survivors have yet to win any major victories on the federal level. So they do what they can, hoping that when the next mass shooting happens, more people will take to their cause.

There is hope this time as the students are showing a fierce anger that hopefully will power something good. And they and others are not politicizing a tragedy, politics is the means to getting something done.