The FBI’s assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office said Tuesday that gunman Aaron Alexis acted alone in the Navy Yard shooting that killed 12 people and added “we do not have any information” that an AR-15 was used. Mike Lupica’s column was written Monday when The Daily News and The Associated Press among many others reported, using reputable law enforcement sources, that the shooter Alexis had used three weapons including an AR-15.
So it takes nine months and two days from Newtown, from 20 dead children and six adults, for someone else to carry the same kind of AR-15 that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School into the Washington Navy Yard.
They call semiautomatics like this sport rifles. You bet. Mostly for the sport of killing innocent people, and killing them fast.
This time the shooter is reported to be a Navy reservist named Aaron Alexis and when he is shot dead by law enforcement, taken out before he can put a gun to his own head the way Lanza did, he has his light, handy assault weapon with him, and a semiautomatic pistol, and a shotgun.
Witnesses talked about Alexis using a rifle. They talked about hearing a succession of rapid shots. It sure sounds like an assault rifle doing the job it was invented to do a long time ago.
Kill as many people as you can before you have to reload.
Lanza used his handgun to finish himself off in Newtown on Dec. 14. It was reported at the time that he left his shotgun in the trunk of his car. He didn’t need it. He was looking to mow down 6- and 7-year-old children less than two weeks before Christmas, and knew his assault rifle would do the job.
This is the way the gun was described on one website I found on Monday after it came out that Aaron Alexis was carrying the same kind of rifle that Adam Lanza was:
“Models for hunting, competition, home defense and tactical use.”
Lanza used one. James Holmes used one in Aurora, Colo. Aaron Alexis was found dead with one on Monday. Sometimes tactical use can mean movie theaters, elementary schools and, it appears, the famous Washington Naval Yard.
More from the ad:
“Renowned for performance, reliability and innovation, it’s no wonder that AR-15 firearms are highly sought after.”
Sought after in Connecticut by the gun-loving mother of Adam Lanza, shot dead by her son the morning of Dec. 14. Sought after by Aaron Alexis, who is reported to have purchased all his guns legally. Good hunting guns to have with you when you decide to go hunting other people.
It is a legal weapon, of course. We still don’t know how much Alexis used it Monday. Of course you heard in the aftermath of Sandy Hook Elementary that gun lovers all over the country, all those who treat the kind of Bushmaster .223 that Lanza used to slaughter children as some must-have accessory to their firearm collection, were buying them up — and legally! — as fast as they could because they were afraid that someday soon the government was going to come and take them away.
But they were safe, as it turns out. Washington, where more innocent people were lost to gun violence on Monday, not so far from the Capitol, has done hardly anything on guns in the nine months between Adam Lanza and Aaron Alexis except talk a good, tough game.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has stood up to the National Rifle Association more than any major politician in this country ever has, is the one treated like the gun nut because he won’t back up or back down. And when Gov. Andrew Cuomo acted on guns in New York back in March, got the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act written into law in his state, you know that Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA and that organization’s chief attack dog, went right after Cuomo the way he always goes after Bloomberg.
“New York is [the NRA’s] great fear,” Andrew Cuomo said at the time. “Because New York did what Washington only threatens to do. Not only can the NRA not believe that happened, they can’t allow it to happen anywhere else.”
Always, in the aftermath of another shooting like this — because there is always another one — we hear about how nothing changed in this country when there was an assault weapons ban in America. That is somehow supposed to be proof-positive that we don’t have to ever take guns that make it this easy to hunt and kill humans off the street.
As if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did as fast as he did on that Friday morning in Newtown if he were simply using a handgun.
Still, there was LaPierre on “Meet the Press” back in March, after Cuomo’s “New York Safe” legislation was passed in Albany, worrying about this state’s new law targeting “sporting firearms, target firearms, self-defense firearms.”
The targets were first-graders and teachers and the school principal in Newtown. Now come 13 dead in Washington, including Alexis. This time it happens in the nation’s capital, the do-nothing capital of the world on the kind of guns that make killing easy. This time the ones at the Washington Navy Yard were the hunted. They were the sport.
