Bloodthirsty NRA just shrugs off deadliest mass shooting

An image of racist Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was on display in January at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, where armed National Guard members have been posted since 9/11, below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

You'll have to search for mention of the evil National Rifle Association in The Record's extensive coverage of the massacre at a gay club in Florida.

An unsigned editorial, referring to the shooting inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, notes:

"The slaughter  of elementary school children was a crime that cried up to the heavens for justice. The National Rifle Association shouted louder" (A-8). 

The reaction of the NRA is so predictable reporters didn't even bother to ask for a statement on a gunman using an assault-style rifle to kill at least 50 people and wound 53 others (later revised to 49 deaths).

Assault-style weapons were outlawed in 1994, The Washington Post reports on A-3 today, but the ban expired in 2004, and Congress apparently caved into the NRA and "opted not to renew it."

More security

After the 9/11 attacks on America, we spent billions on homeland security, including equipping local police departments with armored vehicles, weapons for SWAT teams and other terror-fighting equipment.

But in November 2013, the Paramus Police Department, though armed to the teeth, didn't arrive at Garden State Plaza until after a man with a rifle panicked scores of shoppers and employees by firing rounds into the ceiling before committing suicide in the basement.

In a bottom-line decision, the shopping center, the biggest in New Jersey, didn't employ armed security guards then and doesn't now.

Would more armed security guards at malls, arenas, schools and movie theaters have prevented some of the 14 mass shootings in the past decade (A-3)?

If Pulse, the gay club in Orlando, employed armed security guards, would gunman Omar Mateen have been able to take so many lives?

Offensive column

Veteran reporter Mike Kelly offends readers today with a column that uses plays on words at the expense of the people slaughtered in the gay club on Sunday (A-1).

"And now it's Orlando, Fla., and a nightclub with an ironic name -- Pulse," his Page 1 column begins.

"The latest mass shooting -- the deadliest in U.S. history -- is yet another beat in a disheartening national pulse...."

I'm confused. A mass shooting is a "beat" in a "pulse"? 

Then, Kelly claims "this sort of mass murder may just be America's new normal -- the new pulse of the national heartbeat."

First, the massacre is a "beat," then it's a "pulse." 

This kind of meaningless pushing around of words is typical of Kelly.

Maybe, Kelly's insensitivity toward the death of 50 people in a gay nightclub is rooted in the columnist's well-known homophobia, which was evident in his reporting from Asbury Park in 2000.

In a major piece for The Sunday Record, Kelly failed miserably as a journalist by not saying a single word about the urban gays who were leading the way in reviving the faded shore resort -- as reported by The New York Times' New Jersey section, which was published the very same day.

Clifton bigotry

The local reaction story on Page 1 today should have been given a prominent headline. 

Some readers might be shocked that at least one Clifton resident opposed the raising of a rainbow flag at City Hall, and "wondered whether flags for the Ku KLux Klan and ISIS might be next" (A-1).

The rainbow flag was popularized as a symbol of lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride and diversity in 1978.