NH Paper Attacks Daughter Of Slain Newtown Educator For Implying Sen. Ayotte An ‘Accomplice To Murder’
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) became the target of critics at a recent town hall event in which she was attacked for voting against new gun control measures. One of the questioners, Erica Lafferty, is the daughter of an educator who was killed in the Newtown massacre last year. After skewering Ayotte, Lafferty appeared on a variety of cable news programs excoriating Ayotte for her vote and callous disregard for her slain mother. The New Hampshire Union-Leader, a local New Hampshire paper with a right-leaning editorial board, published an editorial on Wednesday savaging Lafferty and defending Ayotte. They praised the senator for not capitulating in the face of emotional “bullying” and scolded Lafferty for suggesting the New Hampshire senator was “accomplice to murder.”
“A senator’s job is to study the issues that come before the Senate, to engage thoughtfully in debate and to cast a considered vote,” the Union-Leader’s editorial begins. “On the Senate’s voluminous gun control legislation, Sen. Kelly Ayotte did that job incredibly well. And for that she has been attacked by partisans on both sides whose emotional outbursts demonstrate why we need a Senate in the first place.”
The paper notes that Ayotte became a target of the right, with some suggesting she should face a primary challenger in 2016, because of her vote to move ahead with debate on measures like a new assault weapons ban and increased background checks.
Ayotte would later vote against the background checks proposal, an amendment proposed jointly by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), which failed to reach the 60 votes needed for passage. “For that the left has accused her of not caring about the deaths of children,” The Union-Leader observes.
The paper turns to Lafferty, noting that she asked Ayotte pointedly why she felt the onerous burden the bill would have imposed on gun store owners was more important than “the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school.”
“It’s disappointing and disgusting that she can pretty much look me in the eye and try to justify my mother’s murder and the murder of five other educators and the murders of 6- and 7-year-olds,” Lafferty told Politico afterwards. “It’s disgusting.”
No, what is disgusting is deliberately mischaracterizing someone’s position for the purpose of portraying that person as a willing accomplice to murder. That has been the left’s strategy since Newtown.
“It is a testament to the Senate that a majority of its members, including Ayotte, did not cave to such bullying,” the Union-Leader editorial concludes.
Read the full editorial via the New Hampshire Union-Leader
