After the Newtown killings, the customary demands have been made that our political leaders take more action against gun violence. I suggest that those who demand action and take no action themselves are as guilty of fostering gun violence as our politicians who, encountering the well funded rage of the gun lobby, overestimate its power and fear for their political futures. Our silence is their weakness.

Under the present circumstances, even our public grief, however natural, pious, sincere, and inevitable, delays appropriate action now. It cannot atone for a failure to act against the gun mob and its brutal ideology because day after day the slaughter goes on.

In its promotion of universal gun ownership the gun lobby both assumes and fosters the breakdown of our common civic order. It must be stopped and rolled back, a heavy task. But in that task we must remember that the highest possible tribute we can offer to the dead of Newtown and its other partners in misery is activity driven by outrage.