Reactions to mass shootings in the United States admit little variation. Gun control groups diagnose an epidemic, the president declares a crisis and gun advocates prescribe more guns.

After nine people were killed Wednesday inside a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, that pattern has largely held – with the glaring exception of one extraordinary comment by a board member of the National Rifle Association, who suggested that worshippers who died in their own church “might be alive” if they had been carrying guns themselves.

The NRA, the largest and most powerful gun advocacy group in the world, typically mutes itself after mass shootings, and demands that others follow suit out of respect for the dead. The group’s social-media accounts, normally used to promulgate weapons enthusiasm, fall silent.

On Friday, an NRA spokesperson hewed to that strategy, saying that the group would have no comment “until all the facts are known”.

“We are praying for the victims and their families and, given the tragic loss, we don’t think this is the time for a political debate,” spokesperson Jennifer Baker told the Guardian.

Board member Charles Cotton, however, strayed from the script late on Thursday, when he posted a comment online blaming the pastor killed in the South Carolina shooting, Clementa Pinckney, for the death of his eight congregants.