They’ve been abused by the mainstream media, ignored by Sandy Hook Promise, and exploited by anti-gun politicians, but the marksmanship-loving family of  one of Adam Lanza’s targets refuses to let her be exploited:

Rachel D’Avino died Dec. 14, 2012, inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Twenty first-grade students and six staff members died when Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old Newtown resident who had attended that elementary school, stormed into the building with a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle. He shot his way through classrooms, then killed himself as police converged.

The rifle that killed their stepdaughter and sister was the same kind of military-style rifle the family had shot together that Thanksgiving Day. They’re commonly called assault weapons, a term once applied to fully automatic weapons used on the battlefield but now applied to semi-automatic military copycats given the same look, but not the ability to fire continuously with one pull of the trigger.

Rachel’s murder has not marred her family’s memory of that holiday afternoon. For a family of marksmen, it also has not changed their views about guns.

After months of silence, Hannah D’Avino and Peter Paradis said they feel compelled to speak publicly: They are not happy that Rachel D’Avino’s name and her memory are being used to push for more and tougher gun legislation.

Their tragedy, they say, has been hijacked for political gain, to further a message with which they disagree.

Why is it that some weak-minded people feel compelled to find a totem or talisman to scapegoat in the wake of a crime committed by a depraved individual? The vicious and terrified backlash against a kind or brand of firearm in the wake of a crime isn’t the act of a rational mind, but instead echoes the same sort of ancestral superstitious hysteria that once swept through New England towns centuries before.

Burn the witch.

Were they not so dangerous in their fanatical certainty that guns are the cause murder, and not simply an easily replaceable implement, it would almost be amusing.

Burn the witch.

These days, a fevered few shriek with the conviction of Cotton Mather that AR-15s (or other firearms, depending on the outrage of the day) are instruments of the Devil, and that Bushmasters and Colts should be burned at the stake as were Goody Glover and Alice Young.

Sadly, Rachel D’Avino’s family had been largely shunned by the New Puritans, for they dare speak heresy by speaking reason in a culture that honors emotionalism and superstition over reason.

Not one of the 26 souls taken at Sandy Hook were victims of an inanimate object.

Their lives were taken by one of a long line of dangerously mentally ill men let down by a broken mental health care system and the fragile ego of politicians and civil rights advocates who refuse to admit that they failed when they pushed them into society and shut down the asylums in the name of “humanity.”

Tell us… how many more families must be torn asunder in the name of “compassion” for those that should have long ago been institutionalized?

The truly guilty are among the loudest voices screaming to scapegoat an inanimate object, and exploit a tragedy they created. How much longer will it be before they are held accountable?