Who are the real murderers in the school, and movie theater, and shopping mall, and college campus shootings? I accuse the NRA and any slimy politician who takes their money or kowtows to them.

I started to write this piece a few days ago and then put it aside. Perhaps, I thought, I was feeling too angry. Perhaps, I thought, there's no point to it. Perhaps, I thought, all these mass murders for nothing are getting the best of my emotions.

But then, some time this morning, I saw the first news reports of yet another mass murder by a lunatic with a gun. This time it was at Sandy Hook school at Newton, Connecticut. As I write this, 27 people are dead, including kindergarten-age children. Twenty little kids in all.

All you have to do is scroll down here and look at the terrified faces of the little ones who survived the shooting to see the immense pain, and fear they have endured, and to sense the mental scarring they will endure for life.

And please, don't tell me it was a person, not a gun, that did this. It couldn't have been done without a gun. And without the perverted encouragement to love, adore, stroke, oil, insert rods in, play with, fantasize about and fondle guns, encouraged by the NRA and by their enablers in Congress and the Senate.

As I said, I wasn't going to post my accusatory piece. But now I've had it.

This  is the piece I didn't post on Tuesday

It's getting so bad, I can't even keep track of all the senseless shootings all any more. In fact, Google "shootings in the United States" as I just did and you get 1.4 billion – that's one billion and four hundred million results. 

And with all this we have captive legislators in both the Congress and the Senate and Statehouses everywhere who not only fearfully suck up to the NRA, but also work with the NRA to expand "gun rights" into insane notions like "Stand your ground" laws which, as of the moment I'm writing this, produce a mere 35 million results from Google. 

The NRA supporters in Congress and those who have run for Congress with NRA money, and all their counterparts in statehouses around the nation are not merely political whores. (I'm talking to the likes of you, Jim Rennacci of Ohio;  and you, Steve Fincher of Tennessee; and you, Josh Mandel of Ohio; and not surprisingly you, Eric Cantor of Virginia, and also you, Mike Coffman of Ohio – among others. 

These legislators are also murderers, as assuredly as Adolph Eichmann, who never personally gassed one of his victims but who skillfully facilitate their murders, was a war criminal and a murderer who was hanged for his crimes. I said it and I'll say it again with some amplification: 

The supporters of and recipients of largesse from the NRA are, plain and simply, murderers. And they deserve to be treated and dealt with accordingly.

By encouraging unrestricted and nearly unregulated use of guns, and accepting support from an organization that encourages "stand your ground" gun crimes, they are promulgating violence and death as surely as the psychopath who cries "Fire" in a crowded theater encourages death by stampede and panic. 

Every officer and consultant to the NRA, and every person in any legislative body anywhere who supports them, is guilty of the murder of these children and deserves the severest penalty for murder that the law can mete out. And if that is death in some states, so be it.

Friday afternoon afterthought: It's time to separate the legislators with spine from the murder-enabling legislators who support the NRA because they fear the NRA. Last summer, the NRA was warning lawmakers not to support legislation that would reveal who was contributing the money for NRA attack ads. And of course, as you'll see from this article about it, the NRA murderers like to pose with their own weapons in plain view, rather like Bonnie and Clyde. Maybe the U.S. Marshals should send in a SWAT team.