Below is an editorial that was published in today’s New York Daily News.
The fact that sniper William Spengler got his psycho hands on a Bushmaster AR-15 — the very same model wielded by Newtown madman Adam Lanza — speaks volumes about why assault weapons must be absolutely banned.
Not even the looniest National Rifle Association extremist would contend that Spengler — a convicted murderer who killed his own grandmother with a hammer in 1981 — was fit to possess any gun, let alone a military-style semiautomatic rifle.
Yet possess one he clearly did, along with a .38-caliber revolver and a 12gauge shotgun.
Spengler had this arsenal when he perpetrated his Christmas Eve ambush near upstate Rochester, killing two firefighters and wounding three others before turning one of the weapons on himself.
In a chilling note, Spengler revealed why he had armed himself and set fire to his own home, likely killing his sister. He wrote:
“I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down, and do what I like doing best: Killing people.”
How exactly the madman got around state and federal laws that bar felons from owning guns is unknown. What is known is that pulling off such a trick is all too easy.
Spengler might have bought his guns through a private sale from a registered dealer or at an out-of-state gun show — two of the avenues that involve no mandatory background checks and account for 40% of aboveboard gun purchases in this country.
Or he might have picked them up on the black market — which operates with impunity, thanks to the NRA’s puppets in Washington who do whatever they can to weaken laws and hamstring enforcement.
Or he might have stolen the weaponry from rightful owners who are under no legal responsibility to store their weapons safely or securely.
The reality is that killers like Spengler and Lanza will always covet weapons like the Bushmaster, which are custom-made to cause maximum bloodshed in minimum time.
Under America’s Wild West gun laws, such killing machines will inevitably find their way into the wrong hands. Nothing short of banning assault weapons — and taking as many as possible off the streets — can help protect Americans from future killing sprees.
Of course, government must do a better job of keeping guns of all kinds away from felons and known psychos.
But doing that effectively requires strict licensing rules and stringent background checks — policies that Second Amendment absolutists fight against tooth and nail.
It also demands a serious crackdown by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on gun trafficking — which will never happen so long as the ATF is barred from engaging in such basic crime fighting tactics as setting up a computer database to track crime guns back to their original owners.
Sane gun laws would make full allowance for the safe, regulated ownership of guns designed for such reasonable purposes as hunting, target-shooting and self-defense in the home — which, according to the Supreme Court, is all the Second Amendment guarantees.
But sane laws would also ban assault weapons — because there’s no constitutional right to own a military-style rifle capable of spitting hundreds of bullets per minute any more than there’s a constitutional right to own a nuclear bomb.
What’s more, as Gov. Cuomo has rightly pointed out, a real ban must also reckon with the millions of assault weapons already on the market.
They must be confiscated or bought back — because so long as they are out there, no one will be safe from the next Spengler or Lanza.