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What Happened at Sandy Hook.

February 16, 2022

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I deeply regret that in order to write what follows, that 28 adults and children lost their lives at Newtown and Sandy Hook.

              I bought my first (but certainly not my last) assault rifle in 1978.  It was made by Colt and was called the ‘sporter.’ This gun was about as much of a sporting gun as my cat Leonard is a Siamese. 

              Why did I buy an assault rifle?  Because it was for sale. Why do you think I’ve bought any gun? Because I need another gun? Yea, right. I need another gun.

              When California passed the first assault rifle ban, which the feds copied in 1994, the gun industry invented the notion that any gun which fired in semi-automatic mode (one trigger pull, one shot) was a ‘sporting’ gun. And they maintained this fiction until yesterday, when the lawsuit brought by the families of Sandy Hook victims was settled for $73 million and the plaintiffs can release documentation about what they learned about that ‘sporting’ gun.

              Want to know what they learned?  You can learn what they learned by reading pages 3 and 4 from the official report, which states that the shooter fired 150 rounds of military-grade ammunition in the 5 minutes between when he entered the school until he shot himself in the head.  And of these 5 minutes, most of that time was spent entering or trying to enter three different rooms.

              Anyone who wants to believe that a gun which can fire 150 rounds and kill 26 adults and children in a couple of minutes is a ‘sporting’ gun will also believe that there really are Martians at Area 51 or that Donald Trump is still President of the United States. And don’t think I’m just indulging in politically-loaded hyperbole by mentioning Donald Trump. Because for years after the Sandy Hook massacre, his good friend Alex Jones stated that, in fact, nobody got shot at Sandy Hook at all.

              The gun industry’s promotion of assault rifles as ‘sporting guns’ occurred because the traditional use of guns for sport, i.e., hunting, was losing its once-dominant place in American culture over time. Remember how Davey Crockett ‘kilt him a bar’ when he was only three?

In 1977, when the country’s population was 220 million, Americans bought 14 million hunting licenses.  In 2019, with a national population of slightly less than 320 million, the same 14 million hunting licenses were sold again.

The real boost for AR-15 sales was provided by the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, because this dreadful assault on U.S. soil, followed by invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq in 2003, created a more militaristic outlook and an increase in the demand for military-style guns.  Gun companies not only promoted assault rifles in their ads, but even showed AR-15 owners hunting while dressed in military fatigues.

But the problem for the gun industry was that you can’t really sell a gun which is designed for military use and pretend that it can replace Grandpa’s old shotgun sitting above the fireplace on the wall. So, what you do is to create a totally fictional product description called the ‘modern sporting rifle’ and get consumers to believe that there’s no real difference between this gun and any other type of gun which hunters or sport shooters carry into the field.

But there is a difference, and by settling the Sandy Hook lawsuit, the gunmaker can continue to claim that the AR-15 is just like any other type of gun, but $73 million speaks for itself.

This lawsuit could also set an interesting precedent for additional legal challenges against the gun industry, because it’s pretty difficult to argue that semi-automatic pistols made by Glock, Sig and other companies are any more ‘sporting’ than the AR-15.  And those guns are used to commit more than 125,000 intentional gun injuries every year.

If that number doesn’t represent the existence of a product which is too dangerous to be sold, then maybe there really are some Martians hiding out at Area 51.

Sandy Hook.

December 14, 2021

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              Today marks the 9th year since a 20-year old kid shot his mother to death one morning in Newtown, CT, then got in a car and drove across town to the Sandy Hook Elementary school where he gunned down 20 children and 6 adults before putting a bullet through his own head.

              The day of the massacre I was standing in my gun shop and around 1 PM or so the phone rang, and it was the town’s police chief who told me to turn on a TV or a radio to catch the news out of Connecticut, which was our neighboring state.

              I watched the broadcast for about 10 minutes, turned off the TV, left and closed the shop and went home. I didn’t turn on the TV again because I was simply too sick to do anything except sit on my living room couch and try my best to avoid thinking about what had occurred.

              Over the next week or so I appeared on various TV programs in my area, and when I asked one of the talk-show hosts why I was being called up and invited to talk multiple times he replied, “You’re the only gun dealer who’s willing to talk about Sandy Hook without ranting about his 2nd-Amendment rights.”

              Frankly, I didn’t think then and I don’t think now that what happened at Sandy Hook and what has happened at the high school in Parkland, Umpqua Community College The Pulse, and every other place where a bunch of people have been gunned down has anything to do with the 2nd Amendment at all.

              So, what if the Constitution allows you to keep a handgun in your home? What’s that got to do with shooting your way into an elementary school and blasting the place to smithereens? So what if the 2nd Amendment says we can ‘keep and bear arms?’ How can the families who lost children or mothers and fathers ever feel that their Constitutional ‘rights’ should somehow replace the presence of a child or an adult in their home?

              And by the way, for all the talk about how we should get a comprehensive background-check law passed so that only ‘responsible’ and ‘law-abiding’ people can own guns, the AR-15 that the kid used to massacre everyone he saw was not only legally purchased and owned by his mother, but there was no law in Connecticut which prevented the kid from borrowing the gun and committing mayhem across town.

              There is something really fuck*ed up when we take a gun designed only for military use and sell it on the open market as a ‘sporting’ gun. There is something even more fuc*ed up when we also let anyone who hasn’t been locked up for a felony walk around with a handgun designed for the military but sold on the open market as a ‘tool’ for self-defense.

              Incidentally, the Sandy Hook shooter not only had an AR-15 as his basic slaughter gun, he also had a Sig pistol which he used to pop a round into his own head. And guess what handgun the U.S. military has been issued this past year? It’s called a Sig.

And just in case you haven’t watched a good war movie lately like ‘Band of Brothers’ or ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ you might be interested to know that the military doesn’t issue troops any kind of ‘sporting’ gun.

I think it’s important to mark anniversaries, both for things that are good and things that are bad. We all need to spend some time thinking about both because as Hobbes once remarked, life is ‘nasty, brutish and short.’

But we don’t have to make life nastier or more brutish or shorter by doing something as stupid as believing that someone walking down the street with a Sig or a Glock in their pocket is helping to keep himself and the rest of us safe.

All he’s really doing is demonstrating that he suffers from a case of arrested mental development and there’s simply no reason to pretend that he represents anything else.

What Does The Sandy Hook Lawsuit Mean For The Gun Industry?

July 30, 2021

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              So, the big news yesterday is that Remington has made an initial offer to the parents and family of some of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims, who were killed in a mass shooting on December 14, 2012. The suit was based on a Connecticut law, negligent entrustment, which basically says that if you sell something you know to be dangerous and the purchase then uses the item in a dangerous way, the seller can be held liable.

              The defendant in this case, Remington Arms, which owns the gun company – Bushmaster – which actually manufactured the gun – tried twice to get the action overruled by appealing to the Federal court using the PLCCA rule, which is the law that grants the gun industry immunity from torts. But PLCCA specifically does not cover legal actions brought under negligent entrustment, so this case eventually headed back to state court.

              Then Remington went bankrupt, and all that stuff had to be worked out. Then we have the Pandemic which has slowed down all civil actions in every state, so finally we get to where we are today – nine years after the 20-year old shot his way into the school and proceeded to kill 6 adults, 20 kids, and then shot himself to death.

              Make no mistake about it – this civil action represents a fundamental test for the entire gun industry, a test the industry has never faced before. And the test facing the industry is important and perhaps precedent-setting because for the very first time, a legal action will turn on how the gun industry describes and markets its products which has never (read: never) come close to being true.

              And by the way, for my friends in Gun-nut Nation who will now sit down and send me an email complaining that I am against gun ‘rights,’ save yourself the trouble because I won’t read what you say, and I won’t respond to the same crap again and again. As I have said hundreds of time, the 2nd Amendment is not a ‘right.’ It’s an amendment, okay?

              Back in the 1980’s, the gun industry discovered that what had been its market – hunting and sport shooting – was dying on the vine. It was also a time when the GOP decided to focus its entire domestic agenda on crime. Willie Horton became a poster-child for promoting the idea that you weren’t safe in your home or in the street if you didn’t have a gun. And since most gun owners happen to be politically conservative and thus vote for the read team, the argument stuck.

              The gun industry manufactured more than 1 million pistols for the very first time in 1988. The industry also began to ramp up the manufacture of assault rifles around the same time. Except the problem with the AR-15 was that it looked like, in fact, was an exact copy of the military gun, and was banned from civilian sales for ten years beginning in 1994.

              When the assault rifle ban expired in all but a few Commie states, the gun industry invented the idea that the AR-15 wasn’t an ‘assault rifle,’ it was a ‘sporting’ gun. The kid who killed 26 adults and children at the Sandy Hook school was inside the building for five minutes or less. In that brief period of time, which included the time he used moving into three different classrooms, he fired more than 90 rounds.

              That’s a sporting gun?  That’s going to be used to bring home some venison for the Thanksgiving feast or shoot some high-flying mallards on their way from Canada to Miami Beach? Give me a friggin’ break.

              The gun industry has been promoting totally cynical and make-believe narratives about its products for years. The good news is that the Sandy Hook lawsuit could force the industry to go back to being what it was and should become again, namely, an industry producing products that can be used in ways that do not (read: not) result in gun violence, either against a single individual or a classroom filled with kids.

Want Help Selling Guns? Hire Alex Jones.

April 6, 2021

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              Conspiracy theories, i.e., blaming someone for doing something whether they did it or not, have been around since the snake gave Eve an apple for a snack, but the whole thing got a big boost during the Presidential tenure of Trump, who now refers to himself as #45. This way he’s hoping that everyone will forget that he lost the election in 2020, even though the election was stolen, which is another conspiracy theory in case you didn’t know.

              Anyway, one of the most prolific conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones, just got his legal head handed to him when the Supreme Court – that’s the Court that’s now so conservative thanks to #45 – refused to hear his appeal about how he has been sanctioned for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook.

              The horrible mess at Sandy Hook Elementary School was the event which created today’s concern about gun violence, as well as giving rise to national gun-control groups like Brady and Everytown, which now rival or surpass the NRA in terms of money, political influence, and size. The CDC has even restored money for gun research into its budget, and a new gun bill may even wind up on the Oval office desk.

              Meanwhile, back in 2012, Alex Jones became a nationally known conspiracy theorist because of what he began saying after Sandy Hook, which was that the whole thing was staged by the federal government to promote a new gun bill and the disarming of America in order to expand the control exercised by the Deep State.

              His relentless lying about the Sandy Hook massacre landed him in court, when he was sued for defamation by several Newtown parents who were threatened and harassed by some of his more fervent believers. Ultimately, Jones admitted that it was his rants, not the massacre, which weren’t true. But he’s still faced with being a defendant in the civil case.

              The other defendant in a civil action brought by the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook is the gun industry itself. Remington, which owns the company y that manufactured the AR-15 used at the school, is being sued under a state law called ‘negligent entrustment,’ which prohibits a vendor from selling a product which is too dangerous to be owned. The lawsuit is on hold because of the Remington bankruptcy, but at some point, it also will be heard.

              The gun industry tried not once, but twice to have this suit overturned, citing the industry’s protection from torts under the PLCCA law. But PLCCA specifically exempts protection under ‘negligent entrustment’ statutes, which is why the Federal Appeals Court allowed this lawsuit to go forward because the “parents deserve their day in court.”

              So, sooner or later the gun industry will have to defend itself for the very first time for making products that are too dangerous to be owned or sold. And no doubt Remington will try to convince a jury that it’s not guns that are dangerous, it’s the people who use guns illegally or inappropriately who are a danger to themselves and everyone else.

              The defendants in the Sandy Hook lawsuit will also try to make an argument in front of the jury that guns like the AR-15, when used properly following standard, gun-safety rules, are nothing more than very effective ‘tools’ for protecting individuals and families from harm. Indeed, the advertising for assault rifles repeats this self-defense message again and again.

              The narratives being promoted by Gun-nut Nation to justify access to assault rifles are as meaningless, and stupid as what Alex Jones used to say about Sandy Hook. And for that matter, the gun industry makes the same, stupid arguments about why everyone should own and walk around with a concealable, handgun designed for the military like a Glock or a Sig.

              Which is why we now have two petitions online: A petition to ban assault rifles (https://www.change.org/Ban_Assault_Rifles_Now) and another just-posted petition to ban those handguns (https://www.change.org/bankillerhandgunsnow). 

            Ban those guns and gun violence disappears.   

Sandy Hook: A Man Sold A Gun (Guns in America Book 7) – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael R.. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

The Sandy Hook Case Moves Forward.

November 13, 2019

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              On December 14, 2012 a 20-year old first murdered his mother, then shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School, quickly killing 20 young kids and 6 adults before taking his own life.  He left behind a community so devastated that the school building had to be torn down.

              Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court, that’s the court with all those pro-gun judges, declined to hear an appeal of a decision by the Connecticut Supreme Court to allow a lawsuit against the gun maker to go forward. After seven years, it appears that the parents of some of those victims will finally get their day in court.

              The gun industry will also get its day in court. And when this day dawns, the gun industry will, for the very first time, have to prove that at least one of its products isn’t too dangerous to be manufactured and sold.

              Way back in the good old days, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the gun industry made most of its products for hunting and sport. Companies like Winchester, Ithaca, Remington and Harrington & Richardson made millions of rifles and shotguns that could be found in just about every rural home. When those homes all disappeared, ditto the guns.

The gun industry, not wanting to go the way of the companies that made mixmasters or typewriters, moved quickly into new product lines based on the idea that guns make us safe and secure. The studies which claimed that guns protected their owners from crime had more holes than a slice of Dorman’s swiss cheese, but since when do we decide what to buy based on facts?

The bottom line is that the guns which started to sell more frequently beginning in the 1990’s weren’t designed for hunting or sport. They were designed to do one thing and one thing only – to kill or injure men, women and children, regardless of how or why those killings and injuries occurred.

The gun industry knew full well that pretending that a military rifle like an AR-15 was just another ‘sporting gun’ had no basis in truth. But so what? Nobody was going to sue gun manufacturers just because they came up with a clever slogan as a way to sell more guns.

At the same time the gun industry was avoiding the issue of product lethality, our friends in Gun-control Nation were doing exactly the same thing. Instead of holding gun makers accountable for the dangerousness of their products, they began promoting the idea that we can reduce gun violence by keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ But what happens when it turns out that most of the mass shooters commit their rampages with an perfectly legal guns?

The two sides in the gun debate avoid the issue of lethality because each side feels it incumbent upon themselves to pretend reverence for the cherished 2nd Amendment.  The pro-gun side never misses an opportunity to ballyhoo (and usually mis-state) the Heller decision, even though prior to 2008 Americans were armed to the teeth without the benefit of any Constitutional protection at all. The anti-gun gang has no choice but to pretend an equally-strong belief in the 2nd-Amendment. After all, who among us would ever dare question the validity of Constitutional ‘rights,’ even if one of those ‘rights’ allows me to yank out my Glock and pop a cap on your head?

The Sandy Hook case cuts through all that nonsense and puts the issue of lethality right where it belongs; namely, whether the manufacturers of this particular commodity can pretend that this item is no more dangerous than any other product bought at the corner store.

The courts have long held that government has a ‘compelling interest’ to protect the community from harm. If someone knows anything more harmful than some jacked-up kid wandering around with an assault rifle and a bunch of 30-shot mags, I’d like to know what it is.  

What’s The Best Way To Regulate Guns?

March 20, 2019

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              Coming up shortly is a debate in the U.S. Senate about a bill which passed through the House extending background checks to all transfers of guns. At the same this issue wends its way through Congress, another approach to reducing gun violence is going through the courts in the form of the lawsuit against Remington brought by some of the parents of victims killed at Sandy Hook.

              These two initiatives represent different methods for making us safe (or at least safer) from a type of behavior which kills and injures more than 125,000 people every year.  This behavior which is referred to as gun violence because it occurs whenever someone picks up a gun, aims it at themselves or someone else and goes – bang!

              I happen to believe that the latter approach is a much more effective method for dealing with this problem. My proof for that statement lies in the fact that the gun-control method embodied in the DeSoto v. Remington case aligns itself with the way in which other countries deal with gun violence, which is the reason why other countries have gun-violence rates far below our own.

              We are the only advanced society which has decided that the most effective way to regulate a consumer product known as a gun is to regulate the behavior of the consumer who owns the gun. Therefore, in order to be a legal gun owner in the United States, you have to prove that you do not fall into a particular behavioral category which prohibits owning or buying guns. These categories are all listed on the 4473 background check form which is filled out when someone buys a gun, but they apply equally as well to owning a gun, no matter how that ownership status came about. The background check bill currently before the Senate basically extends the certification of ‘good’ behavior to any way in which someone gets their hands on a gun. But like the current system, it is still regulating how people behave with a particular consumer product, not how the product is designed or sold.

              The majority opinion in DeSoto v. Remington correctly understood that what is at issue in this case is not the behavior of the shooter per se, but the conscious effort by the manufacturer to advertise the product in a way that would attract consumers who wanted to use this gun to inflict injuries to other human beings. To quote from the decision: “The AR-15 and M16 are highly lethal weapons that are engineered to deliver maximum carnage with extreme efficiency.” Which is hardly how guns designed to be used for ‘sport’ can best be described.

              On the other hand, as long as a gun doesn’t fire in automatic mode, it can be bought and sold by anyone who doesn’t have a behavioral history indicating that the person  buying or owning the gun is at risk for using the weapon in a violent way. Adam Lanza, who shot and killed himself and 27 other kids and adults in Newtown, used his mother’s rifle but if he had waited a few months until he was 21, he could have walked into any gun shop in Connecticut and purchased the same gun himself.

              I’m not saying that extending background checks to secondary sales won’t have an impact on whether or not guns end up in the wrong hands. But as long as we continue to regulate this consumer product by believing that purchase and ownership of products as dangerous as an AR-15 require only meeting minimal standards for lawful behavior, the number of such guns floating around in private hands will continue to increase. And as the number of such guns goes up, the number used to commit violent acts will also go up.

              If a consumer product is dangerous because of the way it’s designed, either you change the design or the product can’t be sold. How do you make an AR-15 safer so that it can’t be used to mow down a classroom filled with kids? You can’t.

According To The NRA, Sandy Hook Was Just A Frivolous Event.

March 17, 2019

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              It took our NRA friends at Fairfax less than 24 hours to respond to the opinion published by the Connecticut Supreme Court after the Court deliberated Soto v. Bushmaster for more than 15 months. And what the boys from Fairfax said is what is always said by the alt-right when a legal decision goes the other way, namely, that it was the product of an ‘activist’ court; ‘activist’ being a code-word for any judicial opinion they don’t like.

              The reason Gun-nut Nation doesn’t like the decision is because it may start a trend around the country where busybody tree-huggers and other liberal types who hate guns will dig up some consumer-protection statute in their state which can be used to take away from the gun industry its beloved federal protection from torts, a.k.a. the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a.k.a. PLCAA.  This law exempts the gun industry from the kind of lawsuits that have been plaguing the tobacco industry for years, namely, taking responsibility for damages from their product even when the product is sold in a lawful way.

              When PLCAA was passed in 2005, the law contained certain exemptions for state laws that gave consumers a basis for legal redress if the product’s use created an injury or a financial loss. Connecticut has such a law, known as the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practice Act (CUTPA), and it was this law which was used by the Sandy Hook plaintiffs to ague their case. It was also this law that the CT Supreme Court majority held to be applicable while a minority of the justices said it was not. I’ll deal with each in turn but first I have to mention a detail of the case that may prove difficult for some to read.

              On the morning of December 12, 2012 a 20-year old named Adam Lanza woke up, took a bolt-action, single shot rifle and shot his sleeping mother in the head. He then took an AR-15 rifle with multiple, hi-capacity magazines, drove to the Sandy Hook Elementary School and within five minutes killed 26 adults and children, then pulled out a pistol and took his own life.

              Adam Lanza didn’t own the AR-15. His mother had purchased the gun a year earlier, and at no time did she state that she had purchased the gun for him. This is the reason that the case could not go forward under the doctrine of negligent entrustment, because the plaintiffs would have been required to prove that the actual purchaser of the product had used it in an unsafe manner, which was obviously not the case.

At the same time, the CT Supreme Court majority held that the case could proceed under CUTPA, because that law “authorizes any person who has suffered an ascertainable financial loss caused by an unfair trade practice to bring an action,” no matter who committed the unfair act. The majority further found that the PLCAA law exempted CUTPA because even though PLCAA exempted only laws which specifically referred to firearm commerce, the CUTPA statute prohibited unfair or deceptive advertising in any kind of commerce, which would supersede the specific limitation found in PLCAA.

              What was the minority opinion which the NRA grasped like a veritable last straw? It was the idea that since PLCCA only covered state laws which contained specific reference to guns, that the CUTPA law couldn’t be used  by the plaintiffs in this case. And if there is any doubt about where the NRA stands on this issue, they applauded the minority dissent because it would protect the gun industry from – ready? – frivolous litigation, obviously a category which includes the Sandy Hook case.

              How many people have to get killed by someone wielding an AR-15 before such an act would’nt be considered frivolous?  Only 17 people were killed at Parkland, so I guess that one was even more frivolous an event than what happened at Sandy Hook. Maybe we should set the bar at 50 dead bodies, maybe 100, maybe more.

What Happened At Sandy Hook.

March 15, 2019

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It took the Connecticut Supreme Court more than fifteen months to issue a ruling in the Sandy Hook case, but when the opinion was announced, it was a doozy. Not only did the Court reverse the Superior Court’s ruling and hold for the plaintiffs against the gun maker whose product was used to kill 26 adult and children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, but the decision got right to the fundamental issue which the gun industry has been trying to wish out of existence for at least the last twenty years.

When gun makers realized that hunting was going the way of the dial telephone, they came up with a brilliant marketing plan to keep the factories humming, namely, the idea of guns as being essential for self-defense. Now the fact that most Americans never find themselves in a situation where they need protection from a criminal threat isn’t at issue here. What is at issue is that enough consumers believed this malarky to keep the gun industry from sliding into the red.

With the advent of terrorism, non-ending battle engagements in the Near East and a generalize fear that something like 9-11 might happen again, however, the whole notion of armed, self-defense was transmogrified into messaging which blurred the traditional boundary between civilian and military weapons, with the gun industry finding its strongest new market in something called ‘tactical’ guns.

Of course the gun industry also knew, particularly after the Heller decision in 2008, that they couldn’t push this move into military-style armaments too far, because Scalia specifically refused to grant 2nd-Amendment protection to what he referred to as ‘weapons of war.’ So the industry invented the idea that guns like the AR-15 weren’t military weapons; they were ‘modern sporting weapons,’ meaning that the word ‘sporting’ could be applied to any gun which fired in semi-automatic mode.

The CT Supreme Court decision is quite lengthy, primarily because it deals not only with the state laws covering consumer protection (CUTPA and negligent entrustment) but it also explains in detail why the gun industry in this instance cannot use the federal tort immunity law – PLCAA – to shield itself from legitimate damage claims. And on Page 12 of the opinion, the rubber meets the road with the following accurate and very strong text: “The AR-15 and M16 are highly lethal weapons that are engineered to deliver maximum carnage with extreme efficiency. Several features make these rifles especially well suited for combat and enable a shooter to inflict unparalleled carnage. Rapid semiautomatic fire ‘unleashes a torrent of bullets in a matter of seconds.’ The ability to accommodate large capacity magazines allows for prolonged assaults.”

Folks – the CT Supreme Court got it right. The AR-15 wasn’t designed to be a ‘sporting’ gun, unless you want to define ‘sport’ as the ability to kill 26 human beings in 4 minutes or less. And if a shooter can deliver that amount of lethal firepower in such a short period of time, it makes the idea of differentiating between full-auto and semi-automatic modes a stupid and sick joke.

What happened at Sandy Hook is that someone used a product that is too dangerous and too lethal for civilian sale. Because the product was used precisely in the way it was designed to be used – to kill as many human beings as possible in the briefest period of time. In all of this my great regret is that in order to force the gun industry to acknowledge the lethality of this product, beautiful and precious lives had to be lost.

Want A Good Conspiracy Theory About Mueller? Try Sandy Hook.

August 20, 2018

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Today our friend Charles Blow has a column comparing Trump’s reaction to Mueller to how Nixon and Clinton responded to Watergate and Lewinskygate in previous years. The difference, however, is that Mueller’s investigation has yet to uncover a specific connection between the Russians and Trump. And until or unless such a connection is found, is Trump all that wrong when he says that Mueller’s work is just a big ‘witch hunt?’

jones2   On the other hand, it takes one to know one, and if there’s one person out there who knows how to fabricate a conspiracy based on unproven assertions, it’s the guy sitting in the Oval Office whose public persona was nourished on conspiracy theories, beginning with the ‘birther’ conspiracy, which Trump continued to peddle even after Obama released a bone-fide birth certificate proving his live birth in the United States.

Trump’s infatuation with conspiracy theories took a big jump forward when he appeared on InfoWars and told Alex Jones that he wouldn’t let Jones down. This was several years after Jones first began promoting the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-organized hoax, a continuing signature story that eventually got him sued for defamation by parents of some of the children who were shot and killed.

What gave a bit of credibility to the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists was, unfortunately, the fact that the national media who invaded Newtown right after the massacre began releasing information that again and again turned out to be wrong. The first mistake was made by CNN, which identified the shooter not as Adam Lanza but as his older brother whose driver’s license was found in the car that Adam drove to the school. The ‘honor roll’ of news organizations that had to go back and change something they initially said, included CNN, CBS, AP, The New York Times and NPR. Once these seasoned reporters admitted that they were wrong, their admissions of wrongdoing made it easy for the conspiracy gang to claim the whole thing was a mis-managed, government affair.

I can’t think of a more delicious irony than the idea that the Mueller investigation is just another conspiracy theory, this time peddled not by the Right but by the Left. Because the truth is that the liberal mainstream still can’t believe that someone as seasoned, as professional, as experienced, as deserving as Hillary Rodham Clinton, could have lost this election to a know-nothing, rabble-rousing racist and moronic loudmouth like Donald Trump.

Now the fact that she spent twice as much money on her campaign as he did on his, the fact that she couldn’t be bothered to make a campaign stop in Michigan where she lost the whole state  by less than 16,000 votes; somehow these kinds of facts seem to have vanished from the post-election narrative being peddled by Hillary’s friends. And please, please do me a favor and shut up about the so-called need to change the Electoral College, okay?  I didn’t notice anyone complaining when Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with a whopping 43% of the popular vote, thanks to the presence of Ross ‘I’ll talk to my people and you talk to your people’ Perot.

The big difference between the Mueller conspiracy theory and the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory is that the latter was based on the idea that the government created something out of nothing in order to push through some kind of ban on privately-owned guns. The funny thing about Obama’s attempt to pass a gun-control bill, which went nowhere the following year, is that it was backed by a guy named Trump, who five days after the massacre, tweeted his support for Obama’s stand.

If Trump really wants to pull the rug out from underneath Mueller, what he needs to do is figure out some kind of connection between Mueller’s investigation and the continuing efforts of David Hogg and the Parkland kids to generate support for a national, gun-control bill. Run that story on InfoWars and Brietbart and it will take on a life of its own.

 

The Lawsuit Against Alex Jones Injects Reality Into The Gun Debate.

May 24, 2018

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Every time a gun-control law is upheld, our friends in the gun-control movement (I think the idea of trying to convince Gun-nut Nation that we don’t want to ‘control’ guns is absurd) exult and rightly so. But the lawsuits filed against Alex Jones by a group of Sandy Hook parents has more significance than any particular legal statute could ever have. What the Sandies are saying is that they have suffered threats, harassment, public humiliation and invasions of their privacy because Jones keeps blaming them for what happened at the elementary school. Which is what conspiracy theory is all about: identify a vulnerable victim and then pile on.

jones   Ultimately, the argument over gun violence is going to get down to how the average person thinks about guns, and the influence of someone like Jones over the public gun debate has been an important factor in the way the argument has gone along until now. The problem in this case isn’t the issue of determining what happened at Newtown, it’s the way that folks who are shocked and dismayed by these kinds of events react by getting involved in activities which might prevent such horrendous massacres from happening again.

I guarantee you that if the Sandy Hook parents had just suffered their silent grief and decided, individually and collectively to stay out of public view, that the conspiracy theories which ramped up immediately after December 14, 2012 would have quickly gone away. But the Sandies formed an organization devoted to promoting alternatives to violence in schools; they journeyed as a group to D.C. to help Obama with his attempt to get a new gun law;  they continue to advocate for restrictions on guns; and worst of all, the sued the gunmaker who manufactured the AR-15 which was used to kill 20 little kids and 6 adults in a five-minute rampage inside the school. Oh, that AR-15 isn’t too lethal for civilian sale.  It’s just a sporting rifle, right?  Yea, right.

The reason that Jones continues driving down the conspiracy path with Newtown, he’s claimed the same thing about the Aurora massacre, by the way, is because much of his audience happens to come out of the gun-owning fringe who feel that even the NRA is too tame to represent their beliefs. Think I’m kidding?  Take a look at his interview of Ted Nugent, whose high-intensity slurs and insults against the liberal ‘menace’ often put Jones to shame.

Jones says that he first got turned onto his political world view because his father was a member of the John Birch Society – remember them?  The Birchers were the first group that created an entire political belief-system around conspiracy theories, in particular the notion that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Communists, liberals, and other enemies of freedom which unless we were all endlessly vigilant, would rear its ugly head. They group has become somewhat more respectable over the last few years, their website is simply another imitation of Breitbart which, thanks to DD Trump has determined that ‘illegal aliens’ are now the big threat.

What makes the legal actions against Jones so compelling is that it forces people to confront the fact that gun violence, which kills and injures an average of 340 people every day, is something that actually takes place.  Let’s say, for example, that a particular locality suffers from a high degree of gun violence and decides to enact a new gun-control law.  What’s to stop someone like Alex Jones from saying that the 24 gun murders which occurred in a certain city so far this year weren’t just staged?

When the NRA says that it’s not the gun that kills people, it’s people who kill people, they are promoting a false narrative which is no different than Alex Jones claiming that Sandy Hook never took place. It’s high time that such cynically-proffered delusions get challenged not just in the law courts, but in the court of public opinion as well.

 

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