Gun-control types try never to let a tragedy go to waste.

But sometimes their target won’t go along.

After the December shootings in Newtown, Conn., anti-Second Amendment groups pulled out all the stops to try to turn the deaths of 20 children in to a political victory. They paraded the families on a jaunt to the nation’s capital, they flooded the two with cameras, milking every minute of emotion for all it was worth from the understandably shocked town.

Burkesville, Ky., was a different story.

A New York Times story Sunday reports a cameraman for a German news crew was punched in the face by a man while covering the funeral of a 2-year-old girl accidentally shot by her 5-year-old brother last Monday.The Times reporter, Trip Gabriel, writes he was then warned to leave before the same thing happened to him.

Gabriel’s story has a sense of incredulity: “[A]s mourners gathered for Caroline’s funeral on Saturday, there were equally strong emotions directed at the outside world, which has been quick to pass judgment on the parents and a way of life in which many see nothing unusual about introducing children to firearms while they are still in kindergarten.”

Let’s see. What “outside world” could Gabriel be talking about? Maybe it was his own newspaper, where an anti-gun columnist Joe Nocera used the girl’s death to make a point in two pieces last week, including in a column on Saturday, the very day of the girl’s funeral.

The Times – and anti-gun forces in general – apparently hope to use Burkeville as the new Newtown. Why else would a reporter from a national newspaper be in a small Kentucky town covering the clearly accidental death of a 2-year-old girl?

And why in the world would a television station from Germany have a news crew there too?

Even the Times headline on Gabriel’s story shows the anti-gun agenda at work: “Girl’s death by gunshot is rejected as symbol.”

Covering the news is covering the news. But the Times is trying to make the Burkesville girl, her family and her town into a “symbol” of ignorance.

But this wasn’t a crime like Newtown or an act of terrorism like Boston. By all accounts, this was an accident, nothing more.

And covering it with crass cynicism deserves a punch in the face.

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Joe Saunders

Joe Saunders, a 25-year newspaper veteran, is a staff writer and editor for BizPac Review who lives in Tallahassee and covers capital and Florida politics. Email Joe at [email protected].

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