It expanded rapidly, taking on new members, accumulating vast amounts of cash, funding candidates wherever it wanted and swinging election races its way. Gun control was never a popular theme in a country where access to arms is regarded as a God-given right. “Rabbit stew is pretty good – especially if you’ve achieved it yourself.”It is this bucolic image which the NRA used to present to the American people, of gun-owners as a gang of happy-go-lucky hunters with plaid jackets and game in the back of the pick-up truck. Run largely by sporty retired colonels, the NRA provided social events, safety demonstrations and training. They did not even contest the 1968 Gun Control Act, which banned the sale by mail order of guns and ammunition.It all changed at the NRA’s 1977 Cincinnati convention, when a revolution was launched by hard-line defenders of the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms.

It was led by Neil Knox, a gun writer, at the head of a cadre of young ideologues. For them, the point was politics: the freedom of the individual against the overweening state. They ousted the “bird watchers” in a series of putschs.The Reagan years were a free-fire zone for the organisation. But he learnt to shoot far from Beverly Hills, in rural Michigan. “This was during the Depression and I was expected to bring back a certain share for the table,” he said. Still, it was enough to please some of the NRA’s traditional opponents.Heston himself owns about a dozen pieces, and should you ever be tempted to enter the Heston bedchamber uninvited, beware. He told the New York Post he keeps a shotgun under the bed and a handgun within easy reach, just in case.

“I’m in favour of trigger locks,” he said, but qualified the statement by saying that they weren’t much use. On a Sunday television discussion programme, he backed a move to put locks on guns to prevent accidental discharges. Mr Heston may be 73, but he makes a fine speech, handles the press well and, in the eyes of the public, is a man who once had a direct line to God. His self-proclaimed mission is to nudge the NRA back towards the mainstream, away from the crazies.Heston, a natural charmer, has made a good start. Otherwise, why should they not repeat their mistakes?The Lawrence case is in itself a tragic echo of an earlier outrage against another group of black families from south-east London.In January 1981, 13 black teenagers perished in a house fire after a birthday party in Deptford.