Sometimes How Is More Crucial Than Why

On December 5, an angry young man went upstairs in the Von Maur store at the Westroads Mall near Omaha and administered capital punishment to eight other people for what had gone wrong in his life.  For the next several days, all our media darlings wrung their hands and puzzled over why he did what he did.  Newshounds immediately began to dissect all the trauma and tragedy they could dig up in the young man's history.  Why, oh why did he do it?

Strangely, there was very little attention to how he was able to do it.  So far as I am able to tell, Mr. Hawkins stole an AK-47 and two clips of ammo from his step father, from which he discharged 30 rounds of ammo in a period of less than six minutes, hitting at least 11 people and killing eight.  Then he killed himself.  An AK-47 is an assault rifle with a rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute on full automatic.

There are many questions surrounding a killing with an assault weapon that I would like to hear asked and answered.  Maybe our elected leaders and NRA officials can give a persuasive answer to the question, "How many innocent Americans should be expected to die so that some Americans can have assault weapons?"  I haven't seen the interview with the stepfather in which the intrepid reporter asks, "Why did you need an AK-47?"  I would like to ask politicians from John Kerry to Mike Huckabee to Dick Cheney if they need an assault weapon to kill a deer, duck, pheasant or if they are preserving the right so that they can overthrow a government the find obnoxious?

The shootings were evidently good news for the National Rifle Association, which had this on its website today.  Curiously, the NRA site had no results when I searched on "Robert Hawkins" or "Omaha Shooting."