Andre is a man with strong opinions in a small town, so after Friday’s carnage in a local school, he’d rather use a pseudonym to explain why he thinks tougher gun legislation is nuts.
The right “to keep and bear arms” is famously carved into the US constitution, but for the 72-year-old retired businessman turned professional gardener and history buff, the issue goes deeper than that.
“I don’t have ‘Second Amendment rights’,” he said Monday on his way back from the public library. “I do have unilateral God-given rights to defend myself with whatever weapon is currently in use in the world.”
President Barack Obama, who failed to make good on a first-term promise to renew a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the one used Friday by 20-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School, is now pledging to get tough.
“We are not doing enough, and we will have to change,” he said Sunday on a visit to Newtown to console the families of the dead students and the six teachers who died with them.
Hanza also killed his mother Nancy Lanza, the registered owner of the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle he used in his bloody rampage, at home, before ultimately taking his own life as police closed in.
In Washington, pro-gun lawmakers on Capitol Hill like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, shocked like other Americans at one of the worst school killings in US history, signaled a readiness to revisit the issue.
But on radio talk shows Monday, conservatives like Sean Hannity and Joe Pags berated what they called the “hysteria” of “left-wing liberals” who, they argued, are hellbent on the confiscation of all guns in civilian hands.
In Newtown, Andre, a chatty silver-haired gentleman who sports a flat tweed cap and a mustache, reiterated the often-heard mantra that “guns don’t kill people — people kill people.”
“This hysteria over guns is from people who, I don’t know, are foolish enough to believe that if you took all the axes away from people, there would be no more ax murders,” he said.
“They haven’t outlawed frying pans. Do you know that one of the most common lethal weapons used by women against their husbands in domestic quarrels is a frying pan? Who’s controlling frying pans?”
Connecticut is famous for having some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation, yet it’s also home to a number of gun manufacturers, including two iconic brands: Colt firearms and Sturm, Ruger & Co.
Colt’s website Monday promoted, among other guns, the semi-automatic LE901-16S rifle “to take the shot of your lifetime… be it a prairie dog in Texas, whitetail (deer) hunting in Maine or elk hunting in Canada.”
Newtown is also home to a major gun industry lobby, the National Sport Shooting Foundation, which posted a security guard Monday to shoo away uninvited visitors to its offices where a US flag flew at half mast.
Separately, the New York Times reported that Newtown, population 27,500 and very rural in parts, had been inching towards stricter limits on shooting within its municipal boundaries after a twofold uptick of gunfire complaints.
Andre, who spoke to AFP a few blocks away from the funeral of six-year-old Jack Pinto, one of the youngsters slain Friday, looked surprised when he was asked if he owned a gun.
“Well, I have firearms, yes,” he replied. “I’ve had a shotgun since I was 15 when my father gave me one so that I could get my hunting license. I was shooting guns when I was 10 years old. It’s a tool like anything else.”
Like many conservatives, in the aftermath of Friday’s bloodshed, Andre said the way to prevent another school shooting was to put more guns in schools — specifically, in the hands of trained staff or armed security guards.
“If there had been a means to defend the (Sandy Hook) school with trained personnel, somebody could have plugged that guy long before he got finished” killing 20 first-graders and six educators, including the principal.
In another part of Newtown, business owner Cindy McIntyre, 56, said Friday’s tragedy only reinforced her contempt for guns in general and semi-automatic weapons in particular.
“My mother would never let my father have a gun because she said he had too volatile a temper,” said McIntyre, a mother of two grown-up sons and a native of the Midwest where guns are commonplace.
“There was no need for me to have a gun or for anyone to have a gun.”
She added: “If nothing else, outlaw the bullets. You can have 200 million of these (semi-automatic) guns in the United States but what if they don’t have any bullets to put in them?”
“Something must be done or it will happen again. If it can happen in Newtown, Connecticut, it can happen anywhere.”
On Newtown streets, Andre makes a pro-gun case
