Editorial written by New York Daily News Editorial Board.
This time, the gun death came to New York.
The same ridiculous fiction is being sold to a gullible public that was trotted out after Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland, Buffalo and all the others: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. What’s more pathetic than those who keep selling that myth is the ease with which so many Americans buy it.
Four New Yorkers, Didarul Islam, Wesley LePatner, Aland Etienne and Julia Hyman, went to work in Midtown on a broiling hot Monday and were murdered. Mental illness didn’t kill these four. CTE didn’t kill these four. A supposed aggrievement in a suicide note didn’t kill these four. A semiautomatic assault rifle, identified as either an AR-15 or an M4, killed these four and wounded a fifth, Craig Clementi.
The motive of the dead assailant was not what destroyed four lives and ripped apart surviving families and friends. It was a high-powered rifle rapidly firing bullets. Absent the gun, and the victims would all be alive today. But there was a gun, a big gun, with lots of bullets and we are left with grief and the funerals for the four New Yorkers who were taken from us.
But it wasn’t only the gun, or the gunmakers, or the politicians who peddle the fatal myth. It’s the people across our fraying nation who believe that there is somehow something patriotic about having the power to fire off 45 rounds a minute.
The Second Amendment says nothing about unstable or sick people having weapons of war. How is that a constitutional right? New York has strong gun control laws, but we don’t search people at the border bringing in guns from other states with more lax regulations. Only federal law can bring this insanity to an end, but politicians will decry the killing and do nothing.
And tomorrow more people will die. And the day after that. Again. Again. Again. This time the gun death came to New York.
Islam was a cop, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, pulling in some extra money for his wife and two boys and another baby on the way in a few weeks on what is called paid detail where a private business pays for off-duty uniformed NYPD officers to provide additional security.
