New York Post state columnist Fred Dicker described the December 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators as “a little convenient massacre” on his radio show Live from the State Capitol.
On the January 13 edition of his radio show, broadcast on Talk AM 1300 in the Albany, New York, area, Dicker claimed that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had “promised” not to support stronger gun laws “but then he had a little convenient massacre that went on in Newtown, Connecticut, and all of a sudden there was an opportunity for him.” In January 2013, New York enacted a comprehensive gun safety package that Cuomo described as “the toughest gun laws in the nation.”
News of Dicker's comment was first reported by New York Daily News, but did not include the audio of the remark which can be heard here:
New York Daily News also reported outrage among family members of those who died in Newtown:
“It's basically putting salt in the wound,” said James Wiltsie, whose cousin, Victoria Soto, 27, was among the six adults and 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on Dec. 14, 2012.
“For a professional journalist, I think it was irresponsible and unprofessional for him to say that,” Wiltsie said. “There's nothing 'convenient' about 26 lives being gunned down in an elementary school.”
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Rebecca Kowalsky, whose 7-year-old son, Chase, was killed in the tragedy, said, “You can't fix stupid.”
Dicker has responded by claiming that critics don't understand his “point” about Cuomo “latching on to an horrendous out-of-state mass killing to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the problem of gun-related crime in New York.” He also claimed that his comment was “just the opposite” of “minimizing the horror” of the mass shooting.
Dicker is no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric in the debate over gun laws. During the March 1 edition of Live from the State Capitol, Dicker defended pro-gun protesters who depicted Cuomo as Adolf Hitler during demonstrations at the state capital against Cuomo's gun safety proposal.
Promoting a fraudulent history of the Holocaust, Dicker claimed that critics of the Hitler comparisons “fail to have a sense of history that many the demonstrators have” and that “when they use the Adolf Hitler image they're not thinking of Adolf Hitler the monster of the Holocaust and of world domination. Many of them are thinking in terms of, I guess it was a 1935 law. It was passed by the Reichstag in Germany that took away people's rights to own firearms.” Reporter Alex Seitz-Wald's investigation of the supposed 1935 law found it to be likely sourced from a fabricated Hitler quote.
Dicker's guest, then-National Rifle Association president David Keene, agreed with the hosts assertion, stating, “folks that are cognizant of the history not just in Germany but elsewhere look back to that history and say we can't let that sort of thing happen here.” The Anti-Defamation League subsequently condemned Keene for making an “inappropriate” Holocaust analogy.