Newtown Killer Was Not Wearing Body Armor

Contrary to media reports, the Newtown killer was not wearing body armor when he gunned down more than two dozen innocent people, including his own mother.

Adam Lanza went into the Sandy Hook Elementary School wearing a utility vest, not a bullet proof vest, state police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said Thursday.

“It was a fishing type vest, a jacket with a lot of pockets; it was not a bullet-proof vest,” Vance said.

It was the kind of vest you can go to Wal-Mart or Cabela’s to buy any day of the week, for fishing. You don’t even need a background check with the ATF to get one.

It may seem a small thing, to quibble over what the killer was wearing, but this newly reported fact tells us a few things. Armed security at the school would likely have stopped him cold, saving lives. The media sensationally reported a major point of the story that turned out not to be true at all. No one in the media is repenting for reporting something that has turned out not to be true.

Some in the media are now calling for what amounts to a police state to avoid the next mass killing. Ban private gun ownership, electronically monitor all transactions to look for patterns in the data that could possibly, somehow, alert authorities to the next mass killer. This is such a stupid idea it could only come from a media hack who hasn’t spent two seconds thinking about the inevitable consequences of unleashing total data awareness on millions of law abiding Americans. “Big data” won’t track cash transactions, of course, so the next step would be to ban cash in all purchases or require full electronic recording of personal identification every time anyone buys anything in the entire United States. There would be no escaping government espionage on private citizens at that point, other than in the black markets that would inevitably spring up.

It goes without saying that criminals would never give up their guns, and these black markets would end up empowering them in an underground economy.

“Big data” would not have flagged the Newtown killer’s fishing vest, nor would it have noticed the guns he did not even own, but used in his crime.

The blazing irony that many on the left opposed sensible monitoring of communication between terrorists outside the US but whose phone calls happen to pass through switches located in the United States, yet are now calling for Big Brother to greet you at every single business you patronize, is apparently lost.