You nailed it, and as has been said "Never let a crisis go to waste..."
Combine the above fear you describe with politicians (and their constituencies) demanding that they "DO SOMETHING!" And you get shit laws. There's a bias towards action versus inaction in people's minds; "doing something" e.g. passing a new law, banning a gun, banning brown people, etc is "meaningful" - even if it doesn't actually change anything.
Here's the problem: nothing will change. It would require laws on the order of 100x the scale of what we're conceiving (probably unconstitutional) to move the needle. The raw truth that the population can't handle is this: People (including kids) dying in shootings is the price of the freedom embodied in the 2nd amendment. Terrorists blowing buildings up is the cost of our free and open society. These things will continue so long as we remain a free and open society - and even turning into a dictatorship can't stop it (see: terrorists still attack Russia ala the theater attack).
It's called reality - many have trouble dealing with that.