Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-Westchester/Rockland) today issued the following statement on today’s mass shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school:
“Today’s horrific act of violence in is senseless and heartbreaking. There are no words to express the profound grief we all feel at the loss of so many, especially young children. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their friends and family and the entire Newtown community.
“We cannot tolerate mass shootings as a mere inconvenience or a normal part of our everyday lives. Easy availability of the deadliest weapons to the most dangerous people has cost countless lives and caused immeasurable suffering, never more so than today. Our expressions of sympathy must be matched with concrete actions to stop gun violence.”
That's nothing more than clouding the issue with semantics. When I was younger, and was taught by the military how to to shoot a 9mm Beretta, we always referred to it as an "automatic pistol". Now I suppose they call it something else, "self-loading", or "semi-automatic", or something like that. I don't bother keep up with all the constant changes in firearms jargon. The real point, that you insist upon ignoring with you hair-splitting semantics, is that nobody NEEDS a weapon like that for self-protection. Anybody who needs 15 rounds for self-defense probably shouldn't be carrying a gun in the first place, because they're obviously a bad shot, and all they're going to do is spray a lot of bullets all over the place at random, and probably hit some innocent bystanders. There's only one reason for the existence of weapons such as those, and that is to enable somebody to kill as many people as quickly and easily as possible.