The police chief in Aurora, Colo., said he is confident that
massacre gunman James Holmes acted alone. The police chief was dead
wrong.
Standing
at Holmes’ side as he unleashed an AR-15 assault rifle and a shotgun and a
handgun was Wayne LaPierre, political enforcer of the National Rifle
Association.
Standing at Holmes’ side as he sprayed bullets and buckshot into
a crowded movie theater were Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, a President and a
would-be President, who have bowed to the NRA’s dictates and who responded to
the slaughter Friday with revolting, useless treacle.
BILL BRAMHALL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Standing
at Holmes’ side as he murdered 12 and wounded 59 were the millions of zealots
who would sooner see blood flow and lives end than have to check a box on a gun
registration form.
In a
vain claim of innocence, the fanatics will say Holmes is a monster and a
maniac, that he fired and fired and fired as a man possessed. Each protestation
clamps their fingers with his around the trigger.
Because
they made sure that virtually everyone, Holmes included, has unfettered legal
access to heavy weaponry. And they made sure he was permitted by law to drive
to the kill scene with a fully loaded arsenal.
Such is
the conscienceless extremism of America’s gun lovers that they accept wholesale
slaughter as akin to a fatal highway pileup. Accidents happen, in their
grotesque view, and so do mass killings by firearms.
Accused shooter James Holmes.
Yes,
they do. Massacres come and they go and nothing meaningful changes except that
the body count goes up.
The big
attacks leap to mind.
There
was Columbine — amazingly, just down the road from Aurora — where two severely
disaffected high school students gunned down 13.
There
was Virginia Tech, where a student who had been diagnosed with a severe anxiety
disorder murdered 32 and wounded 17 on two rampages.
Lower
death tolls — two, three, four, five — in offices, parks and restaurants slip
from memory as awful but routine, cause for momentary pain and nothing more.
The
day-to-day mayhem of street-crime shootings, responsible for more deaths than
all the mass carnage combined, makes it to the police blotter, the courts, the
newspapers, the emergency rooms and the cemeteries.
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| This drawing was part of the article (how sensitive) |
Every
Aurora-like spasm provokes the question: How did the killer get his guns?
Overwhelmingly, the answer is that he acquired them legally from a licensed
dealer under the permissive laws of the local jurisdiction and the deliberately
porous oversight of the federal government.
ALAN DIAZ/AP
President Obama says the tragic event 'reminds us of all
the ways that we are united as one American family.'
In
Aurora, the authorities say someone lawfully bought the weapons used by Holmes
and that he carried them lawfully until the moment he pulled a trigger. Even
the purchase of the AR-15, a rapid-fire, military-style semi-automatic fit for
nothing but combat, was by the books.
Once,
federal law would have kept Holmes’ hands off a superdeadly weapon like the
AR-15. In 1994, under President Bill Clinton, Congress outlawed the manufacture
and possession of assault weapons, but the statute had a 10-year expiration
date.
IN 2004,
it went off the books to cheers from the NRA, led by LaPierre, who keeps
Washington in line and who went to ground Friday, declining comment “until all
the facts are known.” As if they aren’t already.
Obama
postures as supporting a new assault weapons ban but has done exactly nothing
to restore the prohibition. Nor has he moved to close the loophole that allows
for gun purchases without background checks at weapons shows.
BOB PEARSON/EPA
Aurora Police Chief Daniel Oates.
His
statement about the Aurora massacre was a dodge. Obama said in part: “If
there’s anything to take away from this tragedy, it’s the reminder that life is
very fragile, our time here is limited and it is precious, and what matters at
the end of the day is not the small things, it’s not the trivial things which
so often consume us and our daily lives.”
With all
due respect, the presidential takeaway should have been a drive for
strengthened gun control, if only for the assault weapons ban. In righteous anger,
Obama should have confronted the NRA’s political might regardless of polls that
show a strong sentiment against restoring the prohibition.
So, too,
Romney, who was no less saccharine than Obama in discussing Aurora and is no
less craven on gun control. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed a state
assault weapons ban and defended tough anti-gun statutes. Then, as a
presidential candidate, he joined the NRA and has since professed fealty to the
group’s positions.
Through
their inaction and their silence, Obama and Romney have fallen into line with
all those who enabled Holmes to take hold of that AR-15 and will enable others
to do so in the future unless America’s political leaders develop the courage
to fight to save lives
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