Long life | 28 December 2012

At the time of writing, a few days after the school massacre in Connecticut, the National Rifle Association remains creepily silent. This normally loud-mouthed, blustering organisation has made no comment on the killings and has even taken down the Facebook page on which it was boasting at the time of having 1.7 million ‘likes’, meaning people who approve of the NRA. Never has it been so self-effacing in response to a gun rampage of this kind. It normally goes straight on the offensive, reiterating for the umpteenth time that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that the right to bear arms is the inalienable constitutional right of every American. Maybe by now, with Christmas behind us, it will have recovered its nerve and resumed its pro-gun propaganda, but for a while at least I have been able to take some solace in its discomfiture.

Compare this to the reaction 12 years ago of a NRA spokesman to the shooting in a Michigan primary school of one six-year-old by another child of the same age, the youngest gun murderer on record.