More blood on the NRA's hands

More blood on the NRA's hands

uncredited/AP

The fire set by the gunman to lure firefighters into his trap.

To the unconscionable list of human sacrifices accepted by the National Rifle Association as a small price to pay for the pleasure of bearing arms, add the names of Mike Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka, the volunteer firefighters assassinated upstate on Monday.

An ex-convict murderer executed Chiapperini and Kaczowka and wounded two other firefighters after luring them to a blaze he had set in a town near Rochester. The killer, William Spengler, was both deliberate and deranged in his lethal bloodthirstiness.

Just as Adam Lanza was in massacring 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

And, of course, just like Lanza, Spengler had a gun.

These last few days, Americans have met the blind, uncaring zealotry of the NRA in the person of Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

On Friday, he blamed the slaughter of the innocents on media phantoms and called insanely for placing armed guards at every schoolhouse in America. On Sunday, appearing on “Meet the Press,” he refused to acknowledge that the ready availability of assault weapons played even the slightest role in the nation’s epidemic of mass killings.

Doing so would be to give ground on the NRA’s fealty to absolute, all-encompassing gun rights â€" likely leading to, by any sane perspective, reasonable regulation. The concept is anathema to the NRA. So its New York troops are gearing up to battle Gov. Cuomo’s hope of establishing the nation’s most stringent gun controls. And so, day by day, bodies are added to the altar of the NRA’s worship.

As surely as an AR-15 can mow down kids in moments, LaPierre will find escapes from responsibility in the Rochester killings. Someone or something else will be to blame. He blustered after Sandy Hook that the answer was to have more people with more guns standing ready to kill bad guys.

But there was a cop at the scene of the fire Monday morning: In addition to being a volunteer firefighter, Chiapperini was a 20-year veteran of local police department. And he’s dead, a good guy, killed by a bad guy who was bent on murder and suicide â€" and who had a gun.