Last Thursday, the National Rifle Association (NRA) boasted on their Twitter feed: "Did you hear? Our #facebook page reached 1.7 million "likes" today! Thanks for being a friend!"

On Saturday, one day after the massacre at the Newtown, Conn. elementary school, the NRA deactivated its Facebook page. And the NRA's main Twitter account has gone silent since Friday.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the NRA and its well-funded political operation is “vastly overrated” and was unable to prevent President Obama’s re-election. “If Congress wasn't so afraid of the NRA — and I can show you that they have no reason to be — but if they were to stand up and do what was right for the American public, we’d all be a lot better off,” the Mayor said.

Meanwhile, a just released Washington Post-ABC News poll done over the weekend shows that Americans favor stricter gun controls by a 54-43% with 3% having no opinion.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre has been silent since Friday.

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But last spring he wrote, “all of our freedoms, all of our rights, all of our values… All of them will be lost if Barack Obama is reelected.” In an October column in the NRA’s newsletter “First Freedom,” LaPierre wrote: “With four more years of Obama, your firearms freedoms are gone. And we’ll spend the rest of our lives mourning the freedoms we’ve lost… Every freedom we cherish as Americans is endangered by Obama. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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I hold Wayne Lapierre, the rabidly unreasonable head of the NRA, to be responsible for more American deaths than Osama bin Laden. — Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 16, 2012

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