Like William Spengler, the convicted felon who killed
firefighters on Christmas Eve in Webster, NY with a weapon bought by a straw
purchaser, Kurt Myers also set his home ablaze and began a killing spree last
week in Herkimer County, New York . Like Spengler, Myers
was a loner who acted strangely and whose only motive for the murders seems to
be being armed-while-angry.
49-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier Hardy was pulled off a city
bus in Northern Indiana this week by a former boyfriend and shot to death in front of horrified
bystanders, including children. Hardy had filed an order of protection against
the shooter, Kenneth Knight, to no avail.
Nearly half the women killed every year are murdered by intimate
partners, most with a firearm, reports the New York Times. Gun rights activists fight successfully to allow
those, like Knight, who are under orders of protections to keep their guns.
Thank you NRA.
This week 18-year-old T.J. Lane was sentenced to life in
prison for the Chardon high school cafeteria shooting in Ohio a year ago which
left three dead and three injured. Remorseless and wearing an undershirt
emblazoned with the word "killer," Lane hurled obscenities and sexual insults
at the families of victims in the courtroom. Like Jeffrey Weise of the Red Moon Indian reservation
massacre and Adam Lanza of Sandy Hook, Lane obtained his lethal weapon from a
family member.
The only thing more predictable than gun murders committed
by disturbed loners, enraged boyfriends and disaffected high school students
who easily got guns, is lawmakers' ability to look past them to their toady
ties to the NRA . Neither a congressman shot
in the head or a bloodbath of four-foot-tall first-graders just learning to
print, will pry our politicians out of the NRA's trigger-happy hands. (Nor will
the gun lobby acknowledge how many--maybe most-- shootings are not by
"outlaws" at all but formerly "law-abiding" people who
become angry-while-armed) Is
anyone surprised the assault weapon ban was dropped from the pending gun bill?
Did anyone think laws will change?
The NRA is like the Mafia during its heyday.
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