It was one of the last things I recall Mary Ann McDonnell saying one week ago yesterday, as I prepared to leave her living room in Shelton, Conn.

“I hope Gracie didn’t suffer.”

This 77-year-old woman allowed her worst fear to fill the room, as she continued to stare in disbelief at the picture of a luminous little girl with golden hair.

Mary Ann’s granddaughter Gracie was gone. Her tender, exuberant spirit had been stolen a day earlier in the sanctity of her first-grade classroom by an intruder who carried a weapon of war into the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Nothing made any sense and yet there were fragments of a nightmare that Mary Ann ?McDonnell couldn’t get past. The Bushmaster assault rifle used to slaughter Gracie, along with 19 of her schoolmates and six teachers, had been one of three guns legally purchased by the killer’s mother.

“I just don’t understand,” Mary Ann McDonnell sighed, “what she was doing with all those guns.”

Nancy Lanza will never be able to offer Mary Ann McDonnell an explanation. Before her 20-year-old son, Adam, embarked on his infamous journey of murder and suicide, he shot his own mother in the face with one of her legally registered guns.

They were the same guns that were supposed to offer Nancy Lanza peace of mind against all the potential threats to her home and family by those unseen forces of evil.

Gracie McDonnell was buried on Friday, one week after her 7-year-old life had been snuffed out by a young man who unleashed a massacre using his mother’s legally purchased assault weapon, much like the ones being used in ?Afghanistan.

Inside St. Rose of Lima Church, 1,000 people mourned the loss of innocence. While outside, the rest of the country was subjected to an obscene defense of this obscene weapon, delivered by the lunatic voice of the National Rifle Association’s high priest, Wayne LaPierre.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” he said. ?LaPierre didn’t have the decency to wait until the last child of the Sandy Hook massacre had been laid to rest before he offered his paranoid vision where humanity — even within the sanctuary of a first-grade classroom — could only be guaranteed at the point of a gun.

Some people foolishly believed Sandy Hook might soften the NRA’s million-dollar-a-year mouthpiece. Maybe, just maybe, Wayne would concede the lunacy of high-capacity ammo magazines and weapons designed to rip people apart.

On the contrary, LaPierre sounded like one of those weird dystopian characters lifted straight out of the pages of “The Hunger Games,” a novel about the ghoulish sacrifice of children, written by Suzanne Collins, who, ironically, lives in Newtown.

“I felt like I was listening to someone who wanted to take us back to Dodge City,” said the Rev. Peter Quinn, pastor of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Westford. “It was so out of touch with everything we’ve seen over the past week.”

Newtown families whose hearts were torn out were not rushing out to buy guns, but rather made their way to the peace of a church pew.

“You don’t try to get your head around something as incomprehensible as what happened in Connecticut,” Rev. Quinn said, “because it’s impossible. All you can do is love people, hold them, be there for them. You can’t get through a tragedy of this magnitude any other way.”

The gun makers who pay Wayne LaPierre’s salary don’t want to hear about the better angels of our nature. Their answer to the slaughter of 20 children is more Bushmasters and more 100-round ammo drums.