This time, the gun death came to New York.
The same ridiculous fiction is being sold to a gullible public that was trotted out after Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland, Buffalo and all the others: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. What’s more pathetic than those who keep selling that myth is the ease with which so many Americans buy it.
Four New Yorkers, Didarul Islam, Wesley LePatner, Aland Etienne and Julia Hyman, went to work in Midtown on a broiling hot Monday and were murdered. Mental illness didn’t kill these four. CTE didn’t kill these four. A supposed aggrievement in a suicide note didn’t kill these four. A semiautomatic assault rifle, identified as either an AR-15 or an M4, killed these four and wounded a fifth, Craig Clementi.
The motive of the dead assailant was not what destroyed four lives and ripped apart surviving families and friends. It was a high-powered rifle rapidly firing bullets. Absent the gun, and the victims would all be alive today. But there was a gun, a big gun, with lots of bullets and we are left with grief and the funerals for the four New Yorkers who were taken from us.
But it wasn’t only the gun, or the gunmakers, or the politicians who peddle the fatal myth. It’s the people across our fraying nation who believe that there is somehow something patriotic about having the power to fire off 45 rounds a minute.
The Second Amendment says nothing about unstable or sick people having weapons of war. How is that a constitutional right? New York has strong gun control laws, but we don’t search people at the border bringing in guns from other states with more lax regulations. Only federal law can bring this insanity to an end, but politicians will decry the killing and do nothing.
And tomorrow more people will die. And the day after that. Again. Again. Again. This time the gun death came to New York.
Islam was a cop, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, pulling in some extra money for his wife and two boys and another baby on the way in a few weeks on what is called paid detail where a private business pays for off-duty uniformed NYPD officers to provide additional security.
His wife is now a widow, his two sons fatherless and his new baby is coming into a world without a dad, because of a gun.
The gun then killed LePatner, an executive at the big financial firm Blackstone, who was in the lobby at 6:30 likely heading home to her own husband, teen daughter and seventh grader son. Besides being a business whiz, LePatner was a philanthropist helping her kids’ school and other charitable causes. She was on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for not even six months. Now her life is over at age 43, because of a gun.
Also murdered in the lobby was Etienne, one of the building’s private security officers, a member of 32BJ, the union that staffs New York’s commercial buildings. He was just 46 and had two school-aged children. Etienne went to work on Monday and never came home, because of a gun.
Clementi was struck with a bullet, but would survive and help cops identify the man wielding the gun.
The killer then took an elevator to the 33rd floor and killed one more victim, Hyman, who only graduated college five years ago. Her whole life was ahead of her. No more. Because of a gun.
Monday morning, as the city got back to work, Didarul Islam, Wesley LePatner, Aland Etienne and Julia Hyman all converged at 345 Park Ave, at 52nd St., between St. Bart’s and the Seagram Building. They all had a purpose for being there. But as the day ended, the gun arrived. It also had a purpose. Its purpose was to kill people quickly. And only the gun fulfilled its purpose on Monday evening.
