GUN violence is no laughing matter, especially at James Hillhouse High School in New Haven, which lost a star footballer to the blight. Yet a roundtable Chris Murphy recently convened there on the issue included this moment of levity. The 44-year-old senator from Connecticut had been asked what he thought of a Republican proposal, endorsed by President Donald Trump, to arm teachers. “Who here thinks it’s a bad idea?” the fresh-faced politician replied, and 200 teenagers were soon rolling in the aisles. It wasn’t just that everyone raised a hand. It was the preposterousness of the notion that issuing stressed-out inner-city teachers with firearms, along with their parking permits and keys to the staff bathroom, could ever make sense. “It’s an idea with no basis in reality,” Mr Murphy said.

Since the shooting of 17 people at a school in Parkland, Florida, in February, many Americans have experienced a similar lifting of the veil on the gun lobby and its self-serving arguments. In response to an assured campaign by gun-control activists, fronted by some of Parkland’s surviving students, the National Rifle Association and its mouthpieces have offered further absurdities. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, said the Parkland kids would do more to protect themselves by learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation (a technique to deal with heart failure, not gunshot wounds, incidentally). Ted Nugent, an NRA board member and singer, discerned “irrefutable” evidence that the kids had “no souls”. Meanwhile public opinion has shifted towards stricter gun laws and millions now say gun violence is one of America’s biggest problems. This suggests the political incentives on the issue could at last be changing. No politician has worked harder for that, or could stand to gain more from it, than Mr Murphy.

The Parkland students have succeeded, in a first for pro-control activists, by matching the zeal and organisational skills of their pro-gun opponents. The same can be said for Mr Murphy on the Hill. Though his views on gun control are unremarkable among Democrats—he defends the Second Amendment but wants more background checks and other curbs on gun sales—he has emerged as his party’s conscience on the issue. Another massacre of children at a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012 explains that. Mr Murphy, newly elected to the Senate, rushed to join a desperate huddle of relatives close to the school. He left it, after the 27th body had been counted, with a new mission: “It seemed like the only path forward was to try to change our gun laws to prevent another tragedy.”

He has since held vigils on the floor of the Senate, at which he recites the names of children shot dead in his state. After a slaughter in a Florida nightclub in 2016, he launched a 15-hour filibuster to demand new controls. Given the popular demand for politicians to sweat passion, this has elevated the profile of a man who, having become a state congressman at 25, might have been viewed as a bloodless careerist. “It’s a personal issue for me,” he says. “I’ve gotten to know the Sandy Hook families and I feel I must satisfy them before I leave office.” The fact that he has young children is another motivating factor; his six-year-old “just went through his first active shooter drill” in kindergarten.

Mr Murphy’s path has been smoothed by the polarising of the issue on party lines. Earlier Democratic advocates of gun control, such as Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, the architect of a landmark law in 1968, had to tiptoe around their pro-gun supporters. Mr Murphy spends much of his time preaching to those who agree with him on guns—and indeed everything, a day with the senator in and around New Haven suggested. At conclaves on gun violence, opioid abuse and brownfield-site redevelopment, he was articulate, informed, had a relaxed, slightly goofy, manner; it was hard to tell how he might fare under attack.

What nonetheless distinguishes Mr Murphy, as he showed at Hillhouse High, is his ability to speak powerfully, especially about gun violence, and yet come across as reasonable and pragmatic. The first quality appears well-attuned to the younger voters making the weather on his chosen issue. The second would ensure him a lead role in any future gun-control legislation. The combination has suggested to some that Mr Murphy, who reached the highest legislative office in his 30s and makes no secret of his ambition, could have a bigger future.

Radical with a smile

With that in mind, his knack of balancing conventional left-wing views with a suggestion of pragmatism looks additionally helpful, because it creates ambiguity about where he stands in his party. He has one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, yet is often spoken of as a moderate. He has opposed most recent military interventions, yet John McCain, a Republican hawk, speaks admiringly of his foreign-policy skills. Identifying him as a moderate seems mainly to illustrate how the definition of political moderation is changing. As the number of true centrists dwindles in both parties, it is being extended to those who express ideological views in a way that sounds reasonable and co-operative, not strident and dogmatic. It is debatable how moderate that really is. But it is much closer to where most voters are, which is another lucky stroke for Mr Murphy.

Only in the realm of economic policy does he appear genuinely unconventional. On the one hand, he supports higher taxes on the rich and free college and is hostile to trade—standard fare of the Sanders-Warren left. On the other he offers a compelling analysis of why it is hard to sell such policies. “The economy is super unfair, but a lot of Americans hear talk of fairness as a promise to take from me and give to someone else,” he says. “Most Americans are obsessed with more—more wages, more hours, more retirement savings. So I don’t think Democrats should be afraid of framing our economic message in terms of growth, not fairness.” Mr Murphy should run with that thought.