Category: News

In January, the board of Paramount, including Shari Redstone, the company’s chair, met with a group of bankers to get an update on the media industry and to hear about potential deals that might help the company better compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Disney.

The bankers, from Goldman Sachs and LionTree, came with many deal ideas, according to four people with knowledge of the meeting. The most logical one, the bankers said, was combining some parts of Paramount — which owns networks like Nickelodeon and MTV, and the Paramount+ streaming service — with those owned by Comcast, the cable giant that owns NBCUniversal and the Peacock streaming service. The two companies already have a streaming joint venture in Europe.

But in the end, the board, Ms. Redstone and Bob Bakish, the company’s chief executive, did not feel compelled to pursue any of the combinations. They would continue to zig while Hollywood zagged.

That is, Paramount — with its collection of streaming services including Pluto TV and Showtime in addition to Paramount+ — would keep going it alone.

The fast rise of streaming has reshaped the media industry in just a few years as companies have felt pressure to spend billions on new TV shows and movies to attract enough subscribers to compete with the industry’s giants. MGM, the famed movie studio, sold to Amazon. And Discovery combined with WarnerMedia, the film and TV giant behind “Game of Thrones” and “Succession.”

Not Paramount. Since the company was created from the merger of Viacom and CBS three years ago, it hasn’t sought another big deal. Instead, the company has been trying to build its own profitable streaming business before the flow of cash from traditional TV, still its big moneymaker, runs dry.

In interviews, both Ms. Redstone and Mr. Bakish said that Paramount, with its global footprint, its streaming businesses and the movie studio behind the new hit film “Top Gun: Maverick,” would have success on its own terms.

“In many respects we continue to be the underdog, and that’s OK,” Mr. Bakish said. “But I think as time goes on, people will continue to increasingly see that Paramount is powerful.”

Ms. Redstone and Mr. Bakish still have to persuade much of Wall Street. In the years since Ms. Redstone championed the effort to unite the two halves of her family’s media empire — Viacom and CBS — to form Paramount, the value of the combined company has fallen significantly. The day the merger was announced, in August 2019, Wall Street valued both companies at $29.6 billion. Today, Paramount is worth $22.1 billion, a 25 percent decline. The share prices of Paramount’s competitors, including Disney and Netflix, have also declined over the same period.

Rich Greenfield, a co-founder and analyst at LightShed Partners, a research firm, is skeptical that Paramount can survive on its own. Paramount’s streaming business is growing quickly, but it’s still not profitable, Mr. Greenfield said. And much of the audience for Paramount’s signature content — think MTV and Nickelodeon — has shifted to new-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

“I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that in five years, this company won’t either have bought other things or become part of something larger,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It’s eat or be eaten time.”

In recent weeks, Wall Street has put a sharper focus on the profitability of streaming businesses. Netflix said in April that it lost streaming subscribers in the first quarter of the year, reversing a decade of growth and causing its stock to tumble. Mr. Bakish said that competitors like Netflix — which he cheekily calls “legacy streamers” — are only now coming around to the importance of the revenue strategies Paramount has embraced for years, including advertising.

The box office, another traditional business largely eschewed by Netflix, is another example, Mr. Bakish said. “Top Gun: Maverick,” is on pace to generate $150 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend, but, in an exception to most movies produced by the studio, it won’t appear on Paramount+ within the typical 45-day window.

Still, some experts think Paramount’s strategy is sound. Brett Feldman, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said that the global market for streaming subscribers is far bigger than the audience for pay-TV subscribers. Paramount+ added 6.8 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Mr. Feldman is in the minority of analysts who have a “buy” on Paramount.

“Not everybody pays for cable, especially outside the U.S.,” Mr. Feldman said. “Most people have an internet connection or cellphone to stream video.”

Paramount got a recent vote of confidence this month from Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by the billionaire Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway said in a filing that it had amassed a $2.6 billion stake in Paramount. Berkshire Hathaway did not explain its rationale for investing in Paramount, and the company declined to grant an interview to The Times. But the news caused Paramount’s shares to spike 15 percent.

Ms. Redstone said Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in Paramount took her by surprise. She got the news hours after it had become public.

“I was out to dinner and the person said to me, ‘What do you think of Buffet’s investment?’” Ms. Redstone said. “And I was like, ‘What?’”

Paramount’s ultimate fate will most likely be determined by Ms. Redstone, who emerged victorious in 2018 from a bitter legal fight with Les Moonves, then the chief executive of CBS, to keep control of the entertainment assets her family had owned for decades. Like her father, the shrewd and bellicose lawyer-turned-mogul Sumner Redstone, Ms. Redstone controls Paramount through National Amusements, a holding company she runs that owns voting stock in the company.

Whereas Mr. Redstone was known for cantankerous and impulsive decisions — he once threatened to sever Paramount’s ties with Tom Cruise after his couch-jumping episode on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — Ms. Redstone is a more understated leader. She underscored the contrast with a joke.

“As I said to my dad once, I said, ‘Everything I am is because of you, except for the nice parts — that came from my mother,’” she said, laughing.

Ms. Redstone said she weighs in on the direction of the Paramount in one-on-one conversations with Mr. Bakish and spends time cultivating business relationships inside and outside the company. She introduced Mr. Bakish to Brian Robbins, who eventually became chairman of Paramount with her support, and helped broker a deal with the South Korean entertainment firm CJ ENM by connecting Mr. Bakish to Miky Lee, the vice chairwoman of the firm’s parent company.

Ms. Redstone was an early supporter of Paramount’s decision to compete directly with major players like Disney and Netflix in direct-to-consumer streaming — a strategy that was still up in the air when Viacom and CBS merged in 2019.

In the aftermath of the merger, leaders at the company debated whether to invest in its existing subscription streaming service — then known as CBS All Access — or to forgo streaming for an “arms dealer” strategy: selling movies and TV shows to other streaming companies, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

So In early 2020, just weeks after the deal closed, Paramount decided to make an initial foray into streaming: The company would put some content from Viacom on CBS All Access, effectively bulking up the service quickly without spending to produce original content.

A few months later, with encouragement from Ms. Redstone and Marc Debevoise, then the company’s digital chief who had co-founded CBS All Access, Paramount decided it would spend money on original movies and TV shows for the service, effectively entering the streaming fray, the people said.

That spring, Mr. Bakish called a series of meetings and asked the heads of each of the company’s network groups to pitch projects for inclusion in a companywide subscription streaming service.

By July of that year, the company was finalizing its current course. At a board meeting, company executives summarized the strategy, along with several possible names for the as-yet unnamed streaming service: Paramount+, Honeycomb, The Eye and Pluto+. (The last option was inspired by the company’s popular advertising-supported streaming service.) Over the summer, they settled on Paramount+, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Under the revamped streaming strategy, major Paramount movies — with the exception of some hits, like “Top Gun: Maverick” — are released on Paramount+ within 45 days of theatrical release. The idea behind that approach is that it gives Paramount one foot in the emerging streaming era and one planted firmly in the traditional moneymaking ways of old Hollywood.

At the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick” last month, shortly after a splashy promotion on a rented aircraft carrier in San Diego, Mr. Cruise paid homage to Sumner Redstone. As Ms. Redstone looked on, Mr. Cruise noted that the movie was being widely released on May 27, which would have been Sumner Redstone’s 99th birthday. (He died in 2020.)

Ms. Redstone said she believed that her father would generally agree with her approach toward Paramount. And she said she thinks that Wall Street will ultimately come around, provided the company delivers on its promises.

“I think the market keeps saying, ‘Show me, show me,’” Ms. Redstone said. “And I really believe we keep showing them.”

LONDON — When Boris Johnson hit energy companies with a windfall tax last week as a way of providing more aid for struggling consumers, it was a bittersweet moment for the opposition Labour Party, which had been promoting just such a plan for months.

For once, Labour could claim to have won “the battle of ideas.” But at a stroke, Mr. Johnson had co-opted the party’s marquee policy and claimed the credit.

This might have been a moment of opportunity for Labour. Mr. Johnson’s leadership has been in jeopardy because of a scandal over illicit lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street — missteps highlighted by a civil servant’s report last week that said senior leadership “must bear responsibility” for the failure to follow the rules.

But some political analysts think Labour should focus less on the “partygate” scandal and more on outlining a clear agenda to British voters, who face rising inflation and a possible recession.

Now out of power for 12 years, Labour has lost the last four general elections, including a thrashing in 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger and the party’s leader at the time, was crushed by Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives.

John McTernan, a political strategist and onetime aide to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that while Labour had made a decent recovery under the current leader, Keir Starmer, it had not yet “closed the deal” with the electorate.

“It looks like modest progress because it is modest progress” said Mr. McTernan, while adding that it was still a “massive rebalancing” after the 2019 defeat.

He praised the advances made under Mr. Starmer, but said the party still had work to do if it hoped to install a Labour government in place of the Tories. “This is the year the tempo has to pick up,” he said.

And while the Conservatives lost badly in recent local elections, Labour has made only limited progress, with smaller parties doing well.

Mr. Starmer suffered a setback recently when the police reopened an investigation into whether he, too, broke coronavirus rules. He promptly promised that he would resign if he were fined by the police — in contrast to Mr. Johnson, who suffered that fate in April but refused to quit.

But whatever Mr. Starmer’s future, the Labour Party has yet to draft a convincing message to win back rust belt regions that abandoned it in the last election and that — judging by the local election results — remain to be convinced.

In the 2019 general election, parts of England that for decades had voted for Labour switched en masse to the Conservatives, allowing Mr. Johnson to recast the political map just as Donald J. Trump did in the United States in 2016.

Since then, Mr. Starmer has junked much of Mr. Corbyn’s socialist agenda, posed frequently alongside the British flag to illustrate his patriotism, taken a tough line against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and become the first Labour leader in more than a decade to visit NATO.

But the party has yet to define itself with a clear new vision to British voters, and Mr. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, has little of the charisma that distinguishes leaders in the mold of Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson.

Even he accepts that Labour is not yet in a solid, election-winning position.

“I always said the first thing we needed to do was to recognize that if you lose badly, you don’t blame the electorate, you change your party,” Mr. Starmer said in an interview this year after meeting with voters at a town-hall meeting at Burnley College in northwestern England. “We have spent the best part of two years doing that heavy lifting, that hard work.”

Yet Labour’s task is huge.

In 2019, the Conservatives captured areas like Burnley, in Britain’s postindustrial “red wall,” and Labour polled poorly in Scotland, once another heartland, losing out to the Scottish National Party. Looming changes to electoral boundaries are likely to favor the Conservatives in the next general election, which must take place by the end of 2024 but that many expect next year.

So Labour is hosting a series of town-hall meetings where uncommitted voters are asked what would lure them back to the party.

After the gathering in Burnley, Lisa Nandy, a senior member of the Labour Party, reflected on the project to mend what she called “a breakdown in trust” between Labour and its traditional voters.

“It broke my heart in 2019 when I watched communities where I grew up and that I call home turning blue for the first time in history,” said Ms. Nandy, referring to the campaign color used by the Conservatives. She represents Wigan, another former industrial town, speaks for Labour on how to spread prosperity to areas outside England’s prosperous southeast, and knows that her party has work to do.

People at the meeting in Burnley liked the idea of cutting energy bills by placing a windfall tax on the profits of oil and gas firms, said Ms. Nandy, speaking before the government announced the plan. Yet few at this time knew this was one of Labour’s main policy proposals.

“The question is, why don’t they know this is what we have been saying?” Ms. Nandy lamented earlier this year, referring to voters.

The reason, she thinks, is that politicians spend too much time in London and too little “on people’s own territory having conversations with them about things that matter to them.”

Labour is also reaching out to a business community whose ties to the government have been strained over Brexit rules that pile mounds of extra red tape onto many exporters. At a digital meeting with businesses in the Midlands, Seema Malhotra, who speaks for Labour on business and industrial issues, heard a litany of problems, including customs bureaucracy, inflation, rising energy and wage costs, and supply-chain difficulties.

“I don’t think anyone is expecting full policy across the board until the time of the next election,” she said. “A lot of what we need to do is about rebuilding our relationship with the country and setting out our values, and people need to get to know the Labour Party again.”

“Whilst people are prepared to listen to Labour again, we cannot be complacent,” she added. “Many people have yet to feel that we have fully moved on from the past enough to now trust us. We have work to do on continuing to demonstrate that our party has changed.”

Some analysts argue that what Labour really needs is a sharper message.

“I know so many progressives who think that politics is like a football game: If you have a 10-point plan on health and your opponents only have a five-point plan you win 10 to 5,” Mr. McTernan said. “You don’t.”

Instead, he added, “You have to say: ‘This is Britain’s big challenge. Labour is the answer. Here’s why and here’s how.’”

To succeed, the party needs to convince people like Ged Ennis, the director of a renewable energy company that equipped Burnley College with solar panels. He has voted for Labour and the Conservatives over the years, but opted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 2019.

Mr. Ennis said he had been convinced that Labour was keen to listen but confessed to having a hazy picture of Mr. Starmer’s politics. “I think what he needs to do is to be brave and to be really clear about what he wants to deliver,” he said.

Natalia Abiyeva is a real-estate agent specializing in rental apartments in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. But lately, she has been learning a lot about battlefield medicine.

Packets of hemostatic granules, she found out, can stop catastrophic bleeding; decompression needles can relieve pressure in a punctured chest. At a military hospital, a wounded commander told her that a comrade died in his arms because there were no airway tubes available to keep him breathing.

Ms. Abiyeva, 37, has decided to take matters into her own hands. On Wednesday, she and two friends set out in a van for the Ukrainian border for the seventh time since the war began in February, bringing onions, potatoes, two-way radios, binoculars, first-aid gear and even a mobile dentistry set. Since the start of the war, she said, she has raised more than $60,000 to buy food, clothes and equipment for Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine.

“The whole world, it seems to me, is supporting our great enemies,” Ms. Abiyeva said in a phone interview. “We also want to offer our support, to say, ‘Guys, we’re with you.’”

Across Russia, grass-roots movements, led in large part by women, have sprung up to crowdsource aid for Russian soldiers. They are evidence of some public backing for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort — but also of the growing recognition among Russians that their military, vaunted before the invasion as a world-class fighting force, turned out to be woefully underprepared for a major conflict.

The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the care packages familiar to Americans from the Iraq war. The most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.

“No one expected there to be such a war,” Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the city of Novokuybyshevsk on the Volga, said in a phone interview. “I think no one was ready for this.”

Ms. Plotnikova, 47, has already made the 1,000-mile drive to the Ukrainian border twice, ferrying a total of three tons of aid, she says. Last week, she posted a new list of urgently needed items on her page on VKontakte, the Russian social network: bandages, anesthetics, antibiotics, crutches and wheelchairs.

Medical gear is in high demand in part because of the growing firepower of Ukraine’s military as the West increasingly fortifies it with powerful weapons. Aleksandr Borodai, a separatist commander and a member of the Russian Parliament, said in a phone interview that materials to treat shrapnel wounds and burns were needed “in great quantities” on the Russian side of the front. More than 90 percent of Russian injuries in some areas, he said, have recently been caused by artillery fire.

Mr. Borodai said that his units had noted the use of 155-millimeter shells fired by American howitzers, and that Russia’s leadership may have underestimated the determination of the West to support Ukraine.

“It’s not making the military operation go any faster from our point of view — it’s making our situation more difficult, I don’t deny it,” Mr. Borodai said, referring to Western weapons deliveries. “It’s possible that our military leaders were not ready for there to be such massive support on the part of the West.”

Ukraine’s military, tapping into Western support for its cause, is benefiting from a far more extensive crowdfunding campaign that is delivering millions of dollars’ worth of donations in items like drones, night vision scopes, rifles and consumer technology.

Most of the groups collecting donations for Russian soldiers appear to be operating independently of the Russian government. They mostly rely on volunteers’ personal contacts in individual units and at military hospitals who pass along lists of what they most urgently need.

In Russia’s state media, these groups are rarely mentioned, perhaps because they undermine the message that the Kremlin has the war firmly in hand. But sometimes the message filters through to the Russian audience.

“Our service members keep saying they have all they need,” a television segment in April about such volunteers explained, “but a mother’s heart has a will of its own.”

Outside state media, however, supporters of the war are pointing to private donations as a key to victory. Pro-Russian military bloggers, some of them embedded with Russian troops, are urging their followers to donate money to buy night vision equipment and basic drones.

“Our guys are dying because they lack this equipment,” one blogger wrote, while “the entire West is supplying the Ukrainian side.”

The needed equipment, largely imported, can be bought at Russian sporting goods stores or ordered online. Starshe Eddy, a popular military blogger, wrote that consumer drones made by the giant Chinese company DJI “have become so firmly entrenched in combat operations that it’s become hard to imagine the war without them.”

Ms. Abiyeva, the real estate agent, showed off on her Telegram account a Nikon Prostaff 1000 laser-equipped range finder that she bought for $400. Nikon says the item “makes seeing — and ranging — deer out to 600 yards a reality.”

“With this kind of tech everything goes better and faster, wouldn’t you say?” Ms. Abiyeva wrote, adding a winking emoji and a heart emoji.

Ms. Abiyeva says she started crowdsourcing aid after her husband, a captain, was deployed to Ukraine and she felt “powerless” to affect the course of events. She visited the hospital attached to her husband’s local military base and got the contact information for surgeons deployed to the war. Ever since, they have sent requests to her directly and passed her contacts along to colleagues.

When one surgeon at a field hospital asked for arterial embolectomy catheters, for treating clogs in arteries, Ms. Abiyeva found another volunteer in St. Petersburg to make the 700-mile trip to deliver 10 of them immediately. Ms. Abiyeva said that when she met the surgeon on her own trip to the region a week later, he told her that six of the catheters had already been used.

“It’s possible that we saved six lives,” she said.

The Russian military’s apparently urgent need for essential medical equipment and basic, foreign-made consumer devices has led some Russians to wonder how the Kremlin has been spending its enormous military budget, more than 3 percent of the country’s total economic output. On the VKontakte page of Zhanna Slobozhan, a coordinator of donations in the border city of Belgorod, a woman wrote that talk of raising money for drones and gun sights “makes me think that the army is totally being abandoned to the mercy of fate.”

“Let’s make sure that at least we won’t abandon our guys,” Ms. Slobozhan wrote back. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Putin visited a military hospital on Wednesday for the first time since the war began. He later told officials that while the doctors he met had assured him that “they have all they need,” the government should “promptly, quickly and effectively respond to any needs” in military medicine.

Still, the notion that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are underequipped is increasingly seeping into Russian public discourse — among both opponents and supporters of the war. In a documentary about soldiers’ mothers released last weekend by the Russian journalist Katerina Gordeyeva, seen some three million times on YouTube, one woman describes her son using a wire to reattach soles to his boots.

An association of retired Russian officers published an open letter on May 19 noting that the public was raising funds for equipment the military sorely lacked “even though the government has plenty of money.” The letter excoriated Mr. Putin’s war effort as halfhearted, urging him to declare a state of war, with the aim of capturing all of Ukraine.

But on the ground, the concerns are more prosaic. With the approach of summer, Lyme disease-bearing ticks are out, and volunteers in Belgorod have been making homemade insect repellent, putting it into spray bottles and delivering it to the front.

A group of women collecting donations in the area learned that some of the Russian-backed separatist forces were so badly equipped that they were using shopping bags to carry their belongings. In their Telegram account with about 1,000 followers, the group put out an urgent call for backpacks, along with shoes, Q-tips, socks, headlamps, lighters, hats, sugar and batteries.

“This is so they understand that they are not alone,” said one of the coordinators of the Belgorod group, Vera Kusenko, 26, who works at a beauty salon as an eyelash extension specialist. “We hope this ends soon.”

PARIS — A logjam of fans that led to a 35-minute delay of the start of Saturday’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool was caused by people attempting to use “fake tickets” to enter the match, the tournament’s organizer said.

The problems with crowd control and access saw thousands of fans, many of them Liverpool supporters with valid tickets, locked out of their team’s biggest game of the season. The confusion, and rising anger, created a potentially dangerous situation in which French police officers, wearing helmets and carrying shields, used canisters of what UEFA, which runs the Champions League, said was tear gas to keep the surging crowds at bay.

“In the lead-up to the game, the turnstiles at the Liverpool end became blocked by thousands of fans who had purchased fake tickets which did not work in the turnstiles,” UEFA said in its statement. “This created a buildup of fans trying to get in. As a result, the kickoff was delayed by 35 minutes to allow as many fans as possible with genuine tickets to gain access.”

The statement went on, “As numbers outside the stadium continued to build up after kickoff, the police dispersed them with tear gas and forced them away from the stadium.”

In the chaos, fans pleaded with stadium stewards to be allowed in, pressing their tickets through the iron gates, and many were left coughing and gasping for breath on the sidewalks outside the Stade de France, a modern arena built for the 1998 World Cup.

Other fans looked for alternate ways in, climbing fences and locked gates. One group of V.I.P.s, delayed because of a problem scanning the Q.R. codes attached to their tickets, scaled a fence in an effort to get to their seats. Once over it, one of the officials said, they watched as the police fought with spectators still outside.

Inside the stadium, where the teams had completed their warm-ups, two 15-minute delays were announced. But even before the crowds outside had dispersed, UEFA went ahead, incongruously, with an elaborate pregame ceremony starring the singer Camila Cabello. Once she finished, the teams took the field and traded handshakes, and the final began.

Police officers stationed at the entrances to the stadium pinned much of the blame for the chaos on the local population of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, where the stadium is located, saying it was not fans wearing the colors of the competing teams but those dressed in what they described as “civilian clothing” who had tried to enter the stadium without tickets.

But France’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, repeated UEFA’s version of events in a Twitter post. “Thousands of British ‘supporters’ without tickets or with counterfeit tickets forced entry and sometimes assaulted the stewards,” he wrote. “Thank you to the very many police forces mobilized this evening in this difficult context.”

Fans blamed a lack of organization, saying several entrance gates were closed, forcing those attending the game to funnel into long lines that developed into a crush of bodies as kickoff time neared.

UEFA officials initially seemed to lay the blame for the problems on “late-arriving fans,” even though huge crowds had been stuck at the gates for hours before the scheduled kickoff.

Tommy Smith, a Liverpool fan who had traveled to Paris from Ireland with a group of friends and family, said his group had arrived two hours before the scheduled kickoff and found that there were few entrances where fans could present their tickets. “They closed every turnstile Liverpool-related,” Smith said. “Fans waited two hours, orderly, nothing out of order, and we were tear-gassed.” He said there was little information or direction from stadium staff.

Liverpool released a statement during the game in which it said the club was “hugely disappointed at the stadium entry issues and breakdown of the security perimeter that Liverpool fans faced.” The team said it had requested a formal investigation into the events.

Ronan Evan, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella group for fans, told The New York Times that the fans were blameless.

“Fans at the Champions League final bear no responsibility for tonight’s fiasco,” he said. “They are victims here.”

By halftime, a UEFA security official said, the Stade de France had been locked down, with all entrances and exits closed, while the police were still deploying tear gas outside the stadium concourses.

“For now it’s safer for you inside than outside,” the UEFA official told an Australian executive looking to leave the stadium at halftime. The security official said that “it was a police decision” to close entry and exit points.

In its statement after the game, UEFA said it would investigate the causes of the crowd problems, which came almost a year after surging crowds of ticketless fans attending the European Championship at Wembley Stadium, in London, overwhelmed stewards to gain access to the final of that tournament. The tournament was also a UEFA event.

“UEFA is sympathetic to those affected by these events,” the organization said, “and will further review these matters urgently together with the French police and authorities, and with the French Football Federation.”

WASHINGTON — Days after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in Texas, politicians in Washington are tinkering around the edges of America’s gun laws.

A bipartisan group of senators is scheduled to hold virtual meetings early next week and has some proposals on the table: the expansion of background checks, legal changes to prevent the mentally ill and teenagers from getting guns, and new rules for gun trafficking.

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and the leader of the effort, said he had not seen so much willingness to talk since 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

But the emerging details of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday suggest that few of the proposals under discussion would have made much of a difference. The gunman did not have a criminal record that might have been caught by expanded background checks. There is no evidence that the gun had been part of a trafficking ring. And so far, there have not been reports of mental illness that might have triggered a so-called red flag law.

More far-reaching efforts — such as banning military-style weapons, raising the age for gun purchases and requiring licensing and registration for firearm ownership — have already been all but ruled out, the result of Republican opposition, Democratic resignation and court rulings.

This month, before the Texas shooting and another massacre at a grocery story in Buffalo, N.Y., a federal appeals court struck down a California law that banned the sale of some semiautomatic weapons to people under 21. Both shootings were committed by 18-year-olds.

The reaction in Washington to the horrific scenes is a familiar combination of pain and paralysis. There is a sense in Congress, at the White House and around the country that it should, somehow, be different this time.

In Uvalde, anguished parents grew angrier on Friday as a top state law enforcement official acknowledged that the police were wrong to have waited more than an hour to confront the gunman as he holed up inside a classroom, firing sporadically while students who were still alive lay still among the bodies of classmates. Hundreds of protesters raged outside the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston — less than 300 miles from the massacre — where the group was celebrating its longstanding partnership with Republicans to block gun control measures.

“How Many More Kids?” read one sign. “You Are Responsible,” read another, painted to look as if it were splattered in blood.

And yet, even in the wake of the slaughter of so many children, Washington’s leading political players are reprising their usual roles.

“There is more Republican interest and involvement today than any time since Sandy Hook,” Mr. Murphy said. “So by definition, that’s different, right? But I also have failed every single time. Almost without exception, these talks, when they start, don’t go anywhere, right? And so I worry about claiming optimism, given that history.”

As the United States entered a holiday weekend on the heels of the two mass shootings, senators headed home for recess. President Biden is set to go to Uvalde on Sunday to once again console a community in the wake of unthinkable losses.

What remains is an enormous gap between the scale of the problem — over 1,500 people have been killed in more than 270 mass shootings since 2009, according to Everytown for Gun Safety — and what America’s political leaders can agree are the right responses to the carnage.

“None of this meets the moment,” said Igor Volsky, the executive director of Guns Down America, a gun control advocacy group. “None of this meets the enormity of the crisis that we’re in, both in terms of mass shootings and the everyday gun violence that’s been spiking. None of it. None of it is resetting the conversation.”

Polling suggests that many Americans are eager for a broader reset.

Nearly 90 percent of adults in the United States support the idea of doing more to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year. And about 80 percent of people say gun purchasers should be subject to background checks, even when they buy their guns in a private sale or at a gun show.

But surveys also reflect the deepening polarization in the country, where about 30 percent of adults say they own a gun.

At the federal level, 51 percent of Americans favor a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons, while 32 percent are opposed, according to a poll this month by The Associated Press and NORC. Three-quarters of Democrats were supportive, compared with barely a quarter of Republicans.

And the divide is also wide between people who own guns and people who do not. (Republicans are roughly twice as likely to say they own a gun as Democrats.)

A sizable majority of people who do not own guns favor banning high-capacity ammunition magazines and creating a federal database to track all gun sales, according to Pew. Fewer than half of gun owners support the same restrictions. By contrast, large majorities of gun owners favor arming teachers in schools and allowing people to carry concealed weapons in more places — changes that are broadly opposed by people who do not own firearms.

The response to mass shootings in the United States is starkly different than the decisive action taken in other developed countries around the world. Britain banned semiautomatic weapons and handguns after shootings in 1987 and 1996. Australia held a mandatory gun buyback after a 1996 massacre and the rate of mass shootings plummeted. Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Norway all tightened gun laws after horrific crimes.

For Republican lawmakers in the United States, even a national tragedy like the two recent mass shootings may not be enough to break through the fear of angering their supporters, who have been fired up over the last several years by former President Donald J. Trump, Fox News and social media.

Since 2017, when Mr. Trump became president, support for banning assault weapons among gun owners, for example, has dropped to 37 percent from 48 percent, according to Pew.

The pressure that Republican elected officials feel to toe the line among their gun-supporting constituents was evident within hours of the grisly news in Texas. A steady stream of Republican lawmakers once again delivered a two-step that has worked for them for years: declaring that none of the measures Democrats favor would have stopped the gunman — even as they steadfastly oppose broader efforts that might.

Republicans have used the delayed police response to the Texas shooting as a way of shifting the debate to school security rather than guns, which have surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death for American children ages 1 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a video that quickly went viral, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, focused blame on “some violent psychopath” when he was questioned by a British reporter in Uvalde.

“If you want to stop violent crime, the proposals the Democrats have, none of them would have stopped this,” Mr. Cruz said. And in Washington, he faulted Democrats and the news media for rushing to “try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

That rigidity by most Republicans for the past decade has contributed to a sense of gloomy inevitability among Democrats in Congress and at the White House. In remarks the day after the Texas shooting, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said he accepted “the fact” that Republicans are unwilling to prevent more killings.

Describing his hope for finding a compromise, he said: “Maybe, maybe, maybe. Unlikely. Burnt in the past.”

Mr. Murphy said he spoke to members of Mr. Biden’s White House staff on Friday, who told him the president was eager to do anything he could to support the nascent negotiations over new gun safety measures.

“He can’t be hands off and he won’t be hands off,” Mr. Murphy predicted, adding, “I think you’ll see him being actively involved over the weekend and into next week.”

But the president and his aides remain wary. There is little appetite for Mr. Biden to pledge action that he knows will fail, setting himself up to look politically impotent. Aides also have cautioned that too much involvement by the president could further politicize the debate, making it harder for Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to reach consensus. And forcing moderate Democrats to take a symbolic, tough-on-guns stand could cost the party even more seats in the midterm elections this fall.

White House officials say it is clear to voters and lawmakers alike that Mr. Biden supports aggressive action on gun safety measures and that Republicans do not. “This isn’t a case of Republicans hiding their position,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Now, White House aides say, it is long past time for the other party to get behind those proposals.

But some activists have run out of patience with that explanation. They say Mr. Biden could — and must — be doing more.

“In your recent address to the nation over the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, you posed the question, ‘Where in God’s name is our backbone?’” Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, a group that advocates on behalf of children and families, wrote in a letter to Mr. Biden on Friday. “We now pose this question back to you as the leader of this nation.”

Ms. Rodrigues called on Mr. Biden to take executive actions to make guns less accessible, such as changing the way gun sellers are defined so that more of them would be required to conduct background checks. And she urged him to convince Senate Democrats to set aside the filibuster in order to ban assault weapons, raise the age limit for buying guns and vastly expand the federal background check system.

Mr. Volsky said he was deeply disappointed in what he called a lack of urgency by Mr. Biden after the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.

“They have this learned behavior that after tragedies like this one, you say all the right things,” he said of Democrats. “And when all of that fails, you throw your arms up and you blame the Republicans. It’s absolutely pathetic.”

Mr. Murphy is not exactly optimistic, but he is more hopeful.

He said that taking some small steps with Republicans could accelerate the decades-long effort to pass new gun safety measures by demonstrating slow but important progress, much the way gay rights and civil rights activists won minor victories before they won big ones.

Mr. Murphy said Republicans needed to see proof that they could vote for new gun restrictions and not be punished by voters. Outrage over the deaths in Buffalo and Uvalde could provide Republicans with a chance to test that theory, he said.

“The story here could be that Congress is discussing a set of measures that are much less than what is necessary to save the maximum number of lives,” Mr. Murphy conceded. “But I also have another story, which is, we’ve done nothing for 30 years, and if we were to do something that was significant and that demonstrably moved the needle on our gun laws, it would be historic.”

“It would,” he said, “break this logjam.”