NRA: put guns in schools Olympic star’s sex selling shame
Call to put police in schools by end of holiday Mayor criticises ‘‘paranoid, dystopian vision’’ Four more dead in shooting in Pennsylvania
THE POWERFUL US gun rights lobby yesterday called for armed police in all US schools within weeks as Americans remembered the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre with a moment of silence.
National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre said attempts to keep guns out of schools were ineffective and made schools more vulnerable than airports, banks and other public buildings patrolled by armed guards.
‘‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,’’ LaPierre told a news briefing, calling on lawmakers to station armed police officers in all schools by the time children return from the Christmas break in January.
The NRA announcement came a short time after bells chimed and Americans bowed their heads to remember the 20 students, all 6 or 7 years old, and six adults killed by a gunman who opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle last Friday (local time) at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
‘‘ Does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?’’ LaPierre asked at the NRA briefing in Washington.
He said the news media and violent video games shared blame for the second- deadliest school shooting in US history. His remarks were twice interrupted by protesters who unfurled signs and shouted ‘‘stop the killing’’.
The slaughter of so many young children has rekindled fierce debate about US gun laws. Last week, some lawmakers called for swift passage of an assaultweapons ban and President Barack Obama commissioned a taskforce to find a way to quell violence, a challenge in a nation with a strong culture of gun ownership.
LaPierre’s comments drew a sharp response from gun-control advocates.
‘‘They offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe,’’ said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
About 50 pro- gun- control protesters rallied outside the downtown Washington hotel where the NRA held its event.
‘‘ They were blaming it on all kinds of other things instead of guns themselves,’’ said Medea Benjamin, co-director of women’s peace group Code Pink, who was escorted out of the briefing after holding up a poster that read ‘‘NRA blood on your hands’’.
Another mass shooting happened yesterday when a gunman killed three people and wounded three state troopers before being killed in a shootout in Frankstown Township, Pennsylvania.
To remember the school massacre, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy observed a moment of silence with mourners and governors from Maine to California asked residents to follow suit. Church bells rang in tree- lined Newtown, and up and down the East Coast.
The attack shattered the illusion of safety in Newtown, a town of 27,000 people where some residents have already launched an effort aimed at tightening rules on gun ownership. A newly formed group calling itself ‘‘ Newtown United’’ met last week to develop a strategy to influence the gun debate.
Democratic Senator-elect Chris Murphy, who spoke to the group on Thursday, called the NRA comments ‘‘the most revolting, tonedeaf statement I’ve ever heard.’’
The NRA proposal would take one of every seven US police officers off the streets during school days, based on a Reuters analysis of US Government data.
Gun rights advocates were quick to back the NRA proposal.
‘‘ They have come up with an idea that is immediately usable,’’ said Joseph Tartaro, executive editor of The Gun Mag, a publication of the Second Amendment Foundation.
But Brian Giattina, a school board member in Birmingham, Alabama, said it would send the wrong message to children, teachers and parents. ‘‘It tells them we have to have a gun to protect them. It is a complex problem that needs to involve mental health, education, law enforcement and the community,’’ he said.
Chris Ennis, 37, of Denver, Colorado, who said he shot his first gun at 7 years old, called the NRA suggestion ‘‘misguided’’.
‘‘I can’t help but think that with armed guards on duty, our schools only lack iron bars and a perimeter of barbed wire from becoming a prison,’’ said Ennis, the son of a long-time English teacher who has a son entering kindergarten.
The Second Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms and hundreds of millions of weapons are in private hands.
The right is closely guarded by gun advocates, even though about 11,100 Americans died in gunrelated killings in 2011, not including suicides, according to preliminary data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the Newtown shootings, the gunman used a military-style rifle and carried two handguns which were legally registered to his mother, whom Lanza shot and killed before the massacre.
The NRA proposal was similar to its call after the 1999 shooting spree at Columbine High School in Colorado, when two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before committing suicide. That school had an armed sheriff’s deputy on duty who was unable to stop the shooting.
At that time, Congress funded a ‘‘ cops in schools’’ programme, though many schools dropped the officers after the federal aid that paid for the programme ran out.
A security consultant to the National Association of Secondary School Principals said armed guards would improve school safety but said it was not clear one would have prevented the carnage at Sandy Hook. ONE OF America’s most distinguished Olympians has apologised on Twitter after admitting living a double life as a Las Vegas prostitute.
‘‘ I do not expect people to understand,’’ tweeted Suzy FavorHamilton, 44, a middle-distance runner who competed at three Olympics and won seven national college titles before working as a prostitute. ‘‘ But the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression.’’
So admired was Ms FavorHamilton that one of America’s most prestigious college athletics awards is named in her honour, putting her on a par with Jesse Owens, after whom the male equivalent is titled. In private, however, she had fought demons since her teens. After coming second in a high school cross- country event she developed an eating disorder.
She later battled postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, now 7, and during her track career she says she was plagued by debilitating self-doubt.
On Twitter, she said she was ‘‘drawn to escorting in large part because it provided coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life . . . As crazy as I know it seems, I never thought I would be exposed, therefore never hurting anybody . . . I have made highly irrational choices and I take full responsibility for them. I am not a victim here and knew what I was doing’’.
She had worked with Haley Heston’s Private Collection, an escort agency, since last December, booking engagements in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. She charged rates that included US$6000 (NZ$7290) for a 24-hour period with a single man, or US$1500 for two hours with a male-and-female couple.
Her profile on the agency’s website said that she had entered prostitution to fulfil a fantasy, but became ‘‘hooked’’.
TheSmokingGun. com reported that she worked under the pseudonym ‘‘Kelly Lundy’’ but revealed her true identity to several clients, expecting them to keep her secret.
‘‘Everybody in this world makes mistakes. I made a huge mistake,’’ she said.