Gun madness
God, I hate the NRA. That group and its mad campaign to stop gun control are as much to blame as one lone gunman for the latest school shootings we now endure.
Today in eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the world saw the ultimate result of letting anyone buy assault weapons. As of this writing, five Amish school girls are dead along with the killer, and five others are clinging to life in hospitals, their bodies ripped apart by bullets because another madman wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. And like the killer in Colorado last week, he targeted exclusively girls.
Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, the killer, drove a milk truck for a living. State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said at a news conference that Roberts had nursed a grudge against someone or something for 20 years. He wouldn't give details, but we will learn soon enough.
Miller armed himself with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, a shotgun, and 600 rounds of ammunition for his assault on the Amish one-room school near Christiana, Pa., where my cousin Faith's husband was once pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Miller referred several times during the news conference to an "automatic" pistol. Automatic pistols have been illegal for civilians for decades, but certain semi-automatic models--notably the notorious Tec-9, Sweden's worst-ever export to the U.S.--could easily be converted to full automatic. If Roberts got his hands on a so-called "pre-ban" Tec-9, perhaps that was what he was using. Yet any number of other rapid-firing 9 mm semi-automatic pistols would have done the job just as well.
Many semi-automatic weapons like this were banned by the 1994 assault weapons bill enacted by the Democratic Congress with strong support from President Clinton. The National Rifle Association set about punishing or trying to punish legislators who voted for the ban. Two years ago, President Bush and the Republican Congress let the assault weapons ban expire. It will be interesting to see if a direct link can be made between the expiration of that law and Roberts' apparently legal purchase of his mayhem machine.
He entered the school, according to Miller, and separated out most of the girls, letting the boys and their teacher go. Then he tied up the girls and lined them up by the blackboard. When the State Police called him on his cellphone, he began executing the girls methodically with shots to the head. Even the survivors--and some of these will likely die--were shot "multiple" times. Then he turned the pistol on himself.
The NRA has arguably become the equivalent of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in American politics. The Klan back then was a corrosive and politically intimidating force in state and local elections in certain states, not all in the South. Today, the Klan is largely a joke, but it wasn't back then. Just as the NRA isn't today. Thanks to the NRA, we don't have the effective gun laws that might have prevented today's tragedy in a small, Amish schoolhouse. It is as much a terrorist organization--albeit in an indirect way--as the terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.