Ghouls Gather to Dance on Little Girls Grave

Down somewhere in Flyover Burkesville, Kentucky, a little girl, Caroline Sparks (2) was accidentally killed by her brother, Christian (5) with a .22 rifle he had recently received as a birthday present.  Reporters from the NY Times, apparently not content to cover the routine shootings in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, not to mention the other urban centers, took a stagecoach or steam locomotive or horse-drawn buggy , or something to Flyover Burkesville to make a point about gun control:

Ms. Beall, a 64-year-old retiree, said she had not heard anyone in town call the parents irresponsible for giving a gun to a 5-year-old or for leaving it unlocked. “Pointing fingers doesn’t really accomplish anything,” she said. “Terrible mistakes happen, and I think that’s what happened here.”

The authorities said the children’s mother, Stephanie Sparks, briefly stepped outside the family’s trailer home when Kristian shot his sister in the chest. Their father, Chris Sparks, shoes horses and works in a lumber mill.

The parents “are taking this really hard,” said a woman leaving the funeral who declined to give her name. A teenage girl said strangers from around the country had written scathing comments online blaming the parents, deepening the town’s pain and anger.

The shooting came after the recent failure in Washington of gun control legislation inspired by the shootings in Newtown, Conn., which exposed a bitter divide on guns. But Burkesville seemed to want no part of being a symbol in a national debate.

But the damn hillbillies of Flyover Burkesville refused to accept responsibility for the tragedy.

“I think it’s nobody else’s business but our town’s,” said a woman leaving a store, who like many people here declined to be interviewed. A woman who answered the phone at the office of John A. Phelps Jr., the chief executive of Cumberland County, whose seat is Burkesville, said, “No, I’m sorry — no more statements,” and hung up.

Not content with no comment, reporters continued to harass the town folk until they got the response they had come for:

After the funeral service, two men advanced across North Main Street toward a single television crew present, from the German network RTL, and punched the cameraman, bloodying his face and knocking him down.

Two other men told a newspaper reporter, “If you had any sense, you’d get out of here. You’re next, buddy.”

Thus proving once and for all time the innate superiority of the New York elite to the hill folk of Kentcky.

Of course, when the Westboro Baptist Church gathers at the funerals of  AIDS victims, or lead guitarists of rock bands, or Graceland, to make their moral and political points, it's a bad thing.

Seen at Althouse.