It's difficult to argue with a point by the Washington Post's Greg Sargent shortly after news had broken of the mass murder at a Connecticut school.

"If today's shooting doesn't prompt action on guns," Sargent wrote on his Twitter account, "then nothing ever will."

You'd think that the shocking horror of 20 children and 6 adults murdered at that school by a crazed gunman using a semiautomatic assault rifle with high-capacity ammunition magazines would prompt some action, either nationally or at least locally.

But nationally the NRA has almost completely embedded itself within the Republican Party and allied itself closely with congressional GOP leaders. As a result, when one of its own members (Gabby Giffords) was nearly killed during an Arizona mass murder by yet another crazed gunman, the U.S. Congress did little more than applaud her return to the chamber.