I was standing in my gun shop on Friday afternoon, December 14, 2012, when I got a telephone call from another gun dealer who had a shop located just across the state line in Massachusetts. This dealer asked me if I had heard about the shooting earlier that day in Newtown, and I laughed and said, “You mean someone didn’t get the booth they were promised at SHOT and settled his score with the NSSF?”
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, also known as the NSSF, is the gun industry’s lobbying organization and also runs the gun industry’s annual trade show known as the SHOT show.
I quickly learned that what had happened that morning was some young guy went into the elementary school at Sandy Hook, which is located right next to Newtown, killed 20 school kids and 6 adults before shooting himself in the head.
After I put down the phone I began to feel physically sick, so I quickly locked up the shop, drove home and spent the next couple of hours lying in bed.
Several hours after I got home, the TV I was watching broadcast the name of the shooter and said that he had killed all these kids and teachers with an AR-15. At which point I went back down to my shop and spent several frantic hours looking through the invoices for the previous several years, hoping to God that I wasn’t the dealer who had sold the kid his gun.
It turned out that the shooter used a gun which was actually purchased by his mother who was also shot to death by her son before he drove to the Sandy Hook school and lit the place up. I’ll stop the narrative about what happened on December 14, 2012, because everyone knows about the terrible events which occurred that day.
Everyone, that is, except Alex Jones, who spent the next several years fabricating and promoting a complete and total lie based on the idea that nobody was shot at Sandy Hook. According to Jones, who peddled this trash nightly on his Infowars show, the whole thing at Sandy Hook was staged by the government to promote a national elimination of civilian-owned guns and thus finally do away with 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’
Not only did Jones concoct a complete and total lie about the Sandy Hook massacre, but he insisted that the parents of the alleged victims, none of whom had actually been shot, were engaged in this conspiracy and actually made money by peddling a false narrative about their children being killed and used the fake story to raise funds which they kept for themselves.
What Jones didn’t count on, however, was the energy and determination of a local attorney, Josh Koskoff, along with the grit of the Sandy Hook parents, who first filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the AR-15, which eventually resulted in a $73 million settlement for the plaintiffs against Remington Arms in 2022.
It would be pretty hard to imagine that a company would pay out $73 million to compensate people for damages which never took place. So, it hardly comes as a big surprise that Jones is now being told to fork over $85 million by a Texas court where the defamation suit against him was filed, an amount which is actually far below the original $1.5 billion awarded but nobody expected Jones to come up with that kind of dough.
Incidentally, it should be noted that Alex Jones was a featured speaker at the January 6th rally in D.C. which was then followed by the MAGA riot at the Capitol. Since Donald Trump’s claims of a ‘stolen election’ had about as much validity as the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre didn’t take place, it figures that Jones would show up to help promote another conspiracy theory that day.
Aside from enjoying the spectacle of seeing Alex Jones humiliated for his nefarious and cruel attempt to use the grief of the Sandy Hook parents to bolster his bank account, this case is a reminder that mass shootings are real events which occur because individuals get their hands on products designed to end multiple human lives.
Anyone who pretends that an AR-15 is no different from any other ‘sporting’ gun should consider himself aligned with the theory that nothing of consequence happened at Sandy Hook.

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