NY Post Columnist Under Fire for Calling Newtown a ‘Convenient Little Massacre’

Josh FeldmanJan 14th, 2014, 12:58 pm

New York Post columnist Fred Dicker has come under fire from gun control groups for referring to the Sandy Hook shooting as “a convenient little massacre” on his radio show Monday, a furor that ended up on the front page of the Post‘s chief rival the New York Daily News.

Dicker and his guest were mocking New York governor Andrew Cuomo‘s gun control push in New York when he brought up the Newtown shooting to make a point.

That was his anti-gun legislation, which he had promised not to do, 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.

Gun control groups immediately pounced, denouncing Dicker’s comments, with New Yorkers Against Gun Violence calling for a boycott of “media outlets that give Mr. Dicker a platform for such hateful comments.”

Dicker provided a statement explaining he meant no offense, he was just making a sarcastic point about Cuomo’s push for gun control in New York.

This group clearly doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to understand, my point, which is a sarcastic reference to the governor latching on to an out-of-state mass killing to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the problem of gun-related crimes in New York. This is a charge that has been made for over a year now by many critics of the governor’s ‘Safe Act.’ I used the word ‘massacre’ intentionally because it refers, by definition, to a horrendous large scale killing, which of course the Newtown horror was.

And the controversy ended up on the cover of today’s New York Daily News.