Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) didn't really say that but she just as well might have.
She was confronted this week by the daughter of one of the school teachers killed in the Newtown shootings. The young woman wanted to know how Ayotte could have brought herself to vote against expanded background checks for gun purchasers. This young woman doesn't want her mother's death to be for nothing. And she certainly doesn't want the pain she is living with to be inflicted on more people.
Turns out, however, that this suffering young woman has it all wrong. It isn't about her and other future victims and their heart-broken survivors. Kelly Ayotte explained that to the young woman, using a canned spiel from the gun lobby. It's about the rights of gun owners. Ayotte made it clear: Nothing must be done that might - just might - cause some restriction on their guniness. "I was worried about that," Ayotte explained.
I didn't know that Second Amendment rights trump all others. That they trump the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It's pretty hard to have life or liberty or happiness when living in a society where you might be shot dead at any moment. Is Senator Kelly Ayotte too dumb to understand this?
She and her ilk rely on the argument that background checks wouldn't have stopped the Newtown shooter. Well, there are plenty of criminal laws on the books right now, but the criminals keep on committing crimes. Should we therefore repeal all the criminal laws?
Cruel Kelly Ayotte rebuffed - ever so politely - that suffering young woman. All Ayotte would accord the dead heroic mother, who died to save the children in her charge, was the assertion that Ayotte was sorry for what had happened.
It's just that Ayotte isn't near sorry enough. She will, however, likely get a whole lot sorrier. Since her vote on the gun issue, her popularity ratings with her constituents has plummeted. Will those voters remember? Will things keeps happening to remind them of Ayotte's mindlessness?
And as I write this, word has come that a five-year-old boy in West Virginia has shot and killed his two-year-old sister. He did it with his own gun, a rifle expressly made for children, called the Cricket. The gun was fully accessible to him. It was HIS. So was the bullet in it that wasn't supposed to be there, the one that killed his sister.
I can't believe this. I live in a country where CHILDREN apparently have Second Amendment rights. Where parents buy guns for their children, for children as young as five years old. Have the parents ever thought of what might happen to THEM the next time their kids get mad at them? And what of the manufacturer who makes "little rifles" for little children? Is there nothing people won't do for money? And are there no laws against giving lethal weapons to little children? No laws to curb the idiocy of such as those West Virginia parents?
For once I am speechless. I just hope Ayotte's constituents hear of the West Virginia insanity. We have to stop the mindless madness.
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