Just when it seemed the National Rifle Association's callous disregard for the mayhem it sows couldn't be any more shocking, it decided to proceed with its national convention in Houston this past weekend. This even as Uvalde, Texas, just 280 miles away, buries 19 of its children.

Most of them were 10 years old when they and two of their teachers were murdered Tuesday by a gunman wielding a legally purchased assault rifle — effectively a weapon of war, one that civilians in most of the civilized world cannot legally possess. The routine use of AR-15 varieties by Americans to kill other Americans en masse can, like most of the nation's unparalleled psychosis regarding firearms, be laid directly at the feet of the NRA and its political lackeys.

The fact that the NRA and most of its scheduled speakers have so blithely gone ahead with the convention indicates that even the organization itself has been poisoned by the nonchalant acceptance of gun violence that it has spread throughout America.

After the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado — generally considered the beginning of the modern era of school mass shootings — the NRA was in a similar circumstance as today, with a national convention scheduled in the same state as the killings. It went ahead with the convention then, too, but audio tapes revealed years later that organizers were in a deep panic about the message it would send.

"At that same period where they're going to be burying these children, we're going to be having media ... (in) the exhibit hall, looking at kids fondling firearms, which is going to be a horrible, horrible, horrible juxtaposition," one NRA lobbyist warned in a conference call at the time.

There's been no indication of such soul-searching by the NRA this time.

At least some gun-rights advocates have done the decent thing and bowed out, including firebrand Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He issued a statement explaining he didn't want to "bring any additional pain or grief" to the grieving. That small gesture to decency is apparently too much, though, for former President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and other attendees, who might as well be thumbing their noses at dead children this weekend.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who last year signed a law eliminating gun permit requirements that might have stymied the Uvalde shooter had they been left in place — has opted for the worst of both worlds: He will send a pre-recorded video to be played at the convention rather than attending in person, because he will be busy ... in Uvalde, addressing the tragedy he and his party helped facilitate.

In a just political world, even Republican voters would punish Abbott and his ilk for the pile of salt they are now heaping onto America's freshest wound.

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