Magan Saving lights a candle after midnight behind the Century 16 Theater where a gunman open fire at moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado July 21, 2012.(Agencies)
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is a member of a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but when he issued a statement expressing shock and horror on Friday after a mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater, he had nothing to say about gun control.
Neither did President Barack Obama nor his Republican rival Mitt Romney, though both canceled campaign speeches on Friday and expressed sorrow for the victims of the shooting rampage.
The killing of 12 people at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie in the Denver suburb of Aurora may spark a fresh round of soul-searching on America's relationship with guns but few predict any real change in the law.
That's because gun control advocates have largely lost the argument against the much more powerful gun lobby, and politicians know the issue is toxic with voters.
One of the few politicians who has long taken a stand is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire backer of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of mayors advocating for stricter rules on gun sales and ownership.
Speaking on WOR Radio on Friday, Bloomberg called on Obama and Romney to tell the public what they would do to reduce gun violence.
"Soothing words are nice, but maybe it's time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it," he said.
"I don't think there's any other developed country in the world that has remotely the problem we have," Bloomberg said. "We have more guns than people in this country."
Most Americans, however, do not believe that tougher gun laws would be the solution. Gallup polls over the last two decades show the percentage of Americans who favor making gun control laws "more strict" fell from 78 percent in 1990 to 44 percent in 2010.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the largest and oldest of America's gun-control groups, is a fraction of its peak size. The center and an affiliated political arm had revenue of $5.9 million in 2010, the most recent year for which information is publicly available - down 27 percent in three years.
In the same year, the powerful pro-gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and its various components took in $253 million from individuals, gun makers and sellers and other supporters.
Even Democratic supporters of efforts to keep a tighter rein on weapons were relatively mum after the shooting.
Democrats in conservative and rural states fear alienating gun owners and the NRA, and crucial presidential battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Iowa and North Carolina have large populations of enthusiastic gun owners.
"We're in the summer before a presidential election and I really don't foresee any serious discussion of gun control," said Kristin Goss of Duke University, the author of "Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America."
Some supporters of Democrat Al Gore still believe his support for gun control laws played a role in his loss of the 2000 presidential election, and "memories of lost elections loom large for politicians," Goss said.
Congress has not approved any major new gun laws since 1994, and a ban on certain semiautomatic rifles expired in 2004. Some states have loosened gun laws to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons or adopted "Stand Your Ground" self-defense laws.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll in April found most Americans supported the right to use deadly force to protect themselves, and two of every three respondents had a favorable view of the NRA, which marshals thousands of activists to oppose even small-scale gun regulations and punish lawmakers who challenge them.
"There are strong forces in American politics, led by the National Rifle Association, that have prevented any real changes in gun control laws in years," said Cal Jillson, a political analyst at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
"In the short term, this incident will give some liberal Democrats an opportunity to talk about gun control in an environment where people are listening, but in the long term it doesn't change anything," he said.
Other high-profile gun-related mass shootings in recent years - the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 and the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona in January 2011 - also sparked some short-term debate but little action.
Opponents of stricter gun control point to events such as last year's killing of 77 people in Norway, which like the rest of Europe has much tighter controls on guns than the United States, as evidence that gun laws don't stop such tragedies.
