The tragic murder of American war hero and ex-Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle and his companion Chris Littlefield at the hands of 25 year old ex-marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who may have been suffering from PTSD, is devastatingly sad. But this sad story is not ideologic in nature, and it shouldn’t be exploited as a political chess-piece.

That didn’t stop the NY Daily News, however, from quickly jumping on the fact that the men were killed with a semi-automatic weapon - insinuating this horrible tragedy into the gun control debate, trumpeting this headline:

“Semi-automatic handgun used to kill ‘American Sniper’ author Chris Kyle at Texas gun range: official”

They waste no time in reporting of Kyle that “He lived by the gun, and died by the gun.” Directly below that, the Daily News hyper-linked their own online petition to ban all assault weapons.  They then make a point of highlighting that Kyle frequently spoke out against gun control, reiterating multiple times in the article that a semi-automatic weapon was the instrument of his death.

Yes - sometimes a sad story is just a sad story. Shame on the NY Daily News for making this sad story their own personal political plaything.