I know it's been over a year since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, but just in case anyone was wondering: It is still 100 percent wrong to make insensitive, trivializing remarks about it. Take this shameful idiocy: New York Post columnist Fredric Dicker called the Newtown tragedy a "little convenient massacre." WHAT THE WHAT? Yes. He said those words out loud, on the radio, in a conversation about New York state's gun legislation.
Oh sure, he apologized. Dicker's apology shows he still doesn't get what was so horrible about his choice of words. But let's at least get his first statement in context.
Dicker was discussing New York State Governor Cuomo's SAFE Act gun-control legislation with conservative satirist Randy Credico on WGDJ Talk AM 1300. He said:
That was his anti-gun legislation, which he had promised not to do, but then he had a little convenient massacre that went on in Newtown, Conn., and all of a sudden there was an opportunity for him.
Right. So everyone's jaw drops at that point. Even if you hate restrictive gun laws, you have to agree -- calling the massacre of children "convenient" is as barbaric as it gets. What is wrong with this man? It's almost like he resents the tragedy for getting in the way of his pro-gun agenda. What he's really saying is that the slaying of these children was inconvenient for him. I mean, the term psychopath comes to mind.
In response New Yorkers Against Gun Violence demanded that Dicker apologize to the Sandy Hook families. So Dicker did the predictable. He gave one of those bullshit defending-your-life non-apology apologies:
This group clearly doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to understand, my point, which is a sarcastic reference to the governor latching on to an horrendous out-of-state mass killing to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the problem of gun-related crime in New York.
I wasn’t minimizing the horror at all, just the opposite. I used the word ‘massacre’ intentionally because it refers, by definition, to a horrendous large-scale killing, which of course the Newtown horror was.
No, Dicker. You were minimizing the horror of it all. Just because he knows the definition of massacre doesn't mean he has the judgment to treat the subject with any amount of sensitivity or common sense -- clearly he doesn't.
I feel like in his original statement, Dicker is placing the Newtown shootings on the same level as the recently passed gun legislation. If anything, the shootings are maybe even less horrific than the gun legislation. I just don't think he gets it. The shootings are much bigger, emotionally and morally, than any set of laws or principles or political agendas. These are people's children we're talking about. How could he lose sight of that?
Do you think there is any possible way of justifying Dicker's statement?
Image via New York Daily News