Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News is outraged over the assault-weapons ban failing in the Senate yesterday and held nothing back with his op-ed today titled, “Spineless pols spit on the graves of Newtown victims by not pushing for assault weapons ban.” An excerpt:
Any fool knows that Lanza couldn’t possibly have killed as many children as quickly as he did on the morning of Dec. 14 without an assault weapon in his hands. So how does the President and any other big politician who allows the gun nuts from the National Rifle Association to win again answer the larger question about weapons that make killings like the elementary-school massacre ridiculously easy:
If not now for a ban for these weapons, when?
If Sandy Hook Elementary doesn’t make every member of Congress take a stand against assault weapons in this country, then what does? How many small coffins do we need the next time?
And after the next Adam Lanza shows up with a gun like an AR-15 in a school or a theater or a shopping mall, no one will believe a word the President says at the next memorial service about profoundly changing gun laws in this country. Because three months after Newtown, it turns out that the President has no real power to change anything when it comes to guns in the hands of the wrong people in America.
Of course background checks are important. But so is an assault weapons ban. And please don’t believe the self-serving and slobbering supporters of the NRA — that means all the politicians in the House and the Senate who have pimped themselves out to the NRA — who tell you that a ban like this won’t make a difference, will not save lives the next time.
That happens to be a shameful and gutless lie.
Again: Ask any gun owner if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did in as short a time as he did — before he was a sure shot putting a bullet from one of his handguns through his snake-filled brain — if he didn’t have an AR-15 in his hands. Then go ask the gun lovers to explain all over again how a ban on weapons like this wouldn’t have saved three young lives that morning, or five, or maybe even more than that.
Yet, on Sunday Lupica penned this piece where he used anonymous quotes from an attendee at a law enforcement conference where Danny Stebbins, a colonel in Connecticut’s State, spoke on yet-to-be-publicly-released details of the Lanza attack. Lupica’s piece from Sunday contradicts his rantings of today where he blames the NRA and thinks an assault weapons ban will somehow, magically I guess, stop the next Lanza. Some excepts:
First, his headline . . .
Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook massacre for years
Meticulous plotting . . .
“We were told (Lanza) had around 500 people on this sheet,” a law enforcement veteran told me Saturday night. “Names and the number of people killed and the weapons that were used, even the precise make and model of the weapons. It had to have taken years. It sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research.”
Video games get a fair amount of blame from the Connecticut State Police, something Lupica conveniently left out of today’s op-ed:
“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”
The man paused and said, “They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.
Another point Lupica missed today: the Connecticut State Police are saying Lanza chose the school as a target because it was a “point of least resistance.” That’s exactly why the NRA said armed guards were needed to protect schools. And it’s also why President Obama agreed with the NRA in his series of “executive actions” on the importance of adding security to schools.
More from the conference:
“He [Lanza] didn’t snap that day, he wasn’t one of those guys who was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore,” the man said. “He had been planning this thing forever. In the end, it was just a perfect storm: These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a violent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist. They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I’m actually going to be a hunter.”
About those high-capacity magazines: turns out Lanza didn’t need them, again via Stebbins:
“It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games. That’s what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in (police) school, about how if you’re moving from room to room — the way he was in that school — you have to reload before you get to the next room. Maybe he has a 30-round magazine clip, and he’s only used half of it. But he’s willing to dump 15 rounds and have a new clip before he arrives in the next room.” [. . .]
“They believe he learned the principles of this — the tactical reload — from his game. Reload before you’re completely out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon (the AR-15), he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing kill games.”
In summary, Wayne LaPierre blamed video games. The Connecticut State Police is, according to Mike Lupica, blaming video games, and for the first time gives us an official indication that it was not just an AR-15 that was used in the killings, but a handgun as well. But Lupica is outraged at the NRA and the AR-15 in particular.
Now here’s the sickening part of the story. The part that nobody really wants to address and that’s what responsibility Adam Lanza’s mother bears for this tragedy. If this is actually what Stebbins said, then I’d say she’s an accomplice. . .
The police in Connecticut believe that Lanza’s mother, a gun lover herself, was an enabler of her son’s increasing obsession with guns, that she was making straw purchases of guns for him all along, and ignoring the fact that he was getting more and more fixated on them.
Lanza didn’t need to steal the guns because his mommy bought them for him. A woman with the financial ability to get her son whatever help he needed, and she failed. Newtown is the result of that failure.
Lupica wants to know how do you stop the next Lanza is the question and I don’t know if you can.
Mike Lupica is no dummy, and I ask with all seriousness, does he really think that Lanza, if denied an AR-15, wouldn’t have done just as must damage with a firearm not banned by Senator Feinstein’s bill?