'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
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AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
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'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
A vile conspiracy theory is gaining traction in the gun rights community.
January 14, 2013
There's been no shortage of delusional claims made by the gun manufacturers' lobby and its allies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Usually, they revolve around macho fantasies of gun owners heroically keeping their cool during surprise attacks, taking down mad gunmen without killing onlookers or being shot by arriving police. In the real world, of course, these are the kinds of people who tend to shoot themselves while shopping for milk at Walmart, rummaging around in their purses for lipstick or sleeping (sleeping can be really dangerous).
But last week, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported that a far more disturbing delusion is gaining traction on the fringes of the “gun rights” movement. Seitz-Wald calls them “Sandy Hook Truthers,” and he appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss the phenomenon. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show here).
Joshua Holland: Alex, Talking Points Memo reported this week that Joe Biden has given some hints of the recommendations that his Gun Control Task Force might offer as soon as next week. They're talking about banning high-capacity magazines and mandating universal background checks. Did you know that as many as 40 percent of all firearm sales in this country are done without a background check?
Alex Seitz-Wald: Yes. It’s really unbelievable. This is the so-called “gun show loophole,” but it extends way beyond gun shows. I can go online on Craigslist right now and find a gun and buy it, without any kind of background check or oversight.
JH: Any private citizen who’s not a licensed firearms dealer can just sell a gun to anybody without doing anything. It’s just crazy.
Anyway, we’re going to have a big fight on our hands against one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, the NRA, which represents the interests of firearms’ manufacturers. That fight is only coming, really, because 20 young children were cut down with a Bushmaster at a Connecticut school. That brings us to your report this week on Salon.com, which I found mindblowing. Alex, tell us about the worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory out there.
ASW: Yes. This is really unbelievable -- I could hardly believe it myself, but we all know about 9/11 truthers by now. These are the people who thought that 9/11 was an inside job. Now these folks -- I’m calling them the “Sandy Hook truthers” -- these are people, and there’s a surprising number of them, who think that the Sandy Hook massacre either didn’t happen or did happen, but was perpetrated by maybe government agents or crazy liberals.
There are different versions of the theory, all in an attempt to create a national movement for gun control. Obama or somebody killed all these little kids in order to get you and me to talk about guns and get the American people interested in gun control.
This was out there for a little while, but then it really picked up steam after they latched onto a girl named Emily Parker. She was a 6-year-old who was killed, and her father has been pretty active in the media. There was a funeral service in Utah, where the governor spoke, and that got a lot of attention. A photo emerged of her sister, sitting on Obama’s lap when he went and visited the family. The girl is wearing the same dress that Emily was wearing in a photo that the family had distributed to the media. To the Internet conspiracy theorists, it must be the same girl. Emily Parker must be alive! Therefore, the whole thing was a hoax.
There’s a YouTube video that lays this all out, and it’s already gotten over 130,000 views. If you look elsewhere, you can find all kinds of Web sites, and blog posts, and forum messages, where people lay this out. They have all kinds of other crazy things about the car being not the one owned by Adam Lanza, and police audio allegedly suggesting there were multiple shooters in the building.
We all know there was tons of confusion on the day of the shooting and a lot of misreporting happened early on, but instead of them dismissing this as the kind of confusion that happens when a terribly disturbing event like this takes place, they latched onto these little things to create this grand construction.
The worst thing, for me, is that they’re denying the grief of these families, these poor parents who had their kids killed. They’re saying it’s all for show and some of them actually want to prosecute the parents for allegedly being actors and accomplices to this crime.
JH: It’s remarkable that people could be so shameless. Do you not have the basic common decency to leave grieving parents alone? It’s amazing.
The evidence – this is very typical, by the way. I’ve seen it with 9/11 Truthers. In the early moments of a big news story -- a big, confusing, breaking news story -- there are always, always, always conflicting details.
Alex, who’s behind this? Who started this? Do you know who’s pushing this?
ASW: It’s really hard to tell. That video that I mentioned was actually made by a production company that produced the film, Operation Terror, which was a really popular 9/11 truther film. It’s a fictionalized version of the truther theory. It’s the exact same people that did the 9/11 truther stuff.
The rest of them seem to be just your run-of-the-mill, Internet cranks. I talked to one of the guys, actually. This is the guy who started it, so he’s really invested here, and has rounded up all the different pieces and put them all in one place. I thought I’d email him and see if he'd respond. I figured he wouldn’t, but he did. I was really disturbed, actually, by the response. I should mention, on his Web site in the About section, he gives himself some credibility by saying, “I’m the only person in the World to solve Lost,” as in the TV show.
JH: (laughs)
ASW: When I emailed him, I asked him about that. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t want to diagnose anybody, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he is having some kind of delusions.
He told me that he launched his Web site on December 21st, which is a significant day. He said – and I’m reading here from his email – “Since I am the new-age Messiah, and the revelation from the Goddess, Tefnut, AKA Ma’at of Egypt, I thought the date was significant.”
This guy, who’s leading this online conspiracy movement, literally thinks he is the new-age Messiah. The word “crazy” gets tossed around a lot, but I think this guy meets a clinical definition of delusions. This is where a lot of this stuff is coming from.
The wild thing, to me, is that you’re only a few steps removed from the other kinds of people that we call “crazy,” but that are intimately involved in the gun debate. Larry Pratt, the head of Gun Owners of America, which is a more radical version of the NRA, he hasn’t said anything quite like this about the Sandy Hook shooting. But after Aurora, he told Alex Jones -- who’s a big conspiracy theorist -- he told Alex Jones that there was a really good chance that government agents perpetrated the Aurora massacre, in order to implement gun control. This is a real thing that’s out there.
There’s a professor at Florida Atlantic University who even got involved in this. It’s really easy to dismiss, but I don’t think we should because it can go, really quickly, from the guy who claims he solved Lost to people who are actually involved in the gun control debate.
JH: It starts with someone who has, it seems, mental health issues. Then all these other people jump in because it’s ideologically convenient. Alex, is this like global warming denialism, just pretending that inconvenient realities don’t exist?
ASW: Yes, I think it is. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, I think, explains so much of this here, which is basically the idea that you have a belief in your head, and any information that contradicts that belief causes stress, and is immediately discredited. You don’t, for a second, consider the possibility that it could be legitimate. You immediately assume that it has to be wrong because it doesn’t comport with your world view.
That’s how all, pretty much all conspiracy theories work, or things that deny reality in the face of evidence, like global warming. I think you’re just getting an extreme case of it here.
JH: To some degree, a lot of conservative, ideological positions are based on that same thing. People who score high on the scale of authoritarian personality types are especially sensitive to cognitive dissonance. They’re the ones who are most likely to grab onto any straw, which will get them out of that stress. Anyway, this conspiracy is supposedly all in the service of conditioning the population to give up their guns.
Alex, what do you think the conversation about guns would look like, in this country, if not for the paranoia, widespread on the right, that someone wants to take Americans’ guns?
ASW: Boy, it’s hard to imagine. It’s really incredible how much this tiny faction of people has dominated the debate. If you ask most Americans about the Assault Weapon Ban or High Capacity Magazine Ban, they’re all for it. This is after Democrats and most liberals have ceded the issue for the past 10 years.
We’ve hardly really had much of a gun control debate at all. Most of what you hear out there is misinformation about the Assault Weapon Ban, but Americans are for it, to the tune of 60 percent. Whether we can get something in Congress is a different matter because of the bizarre way that Congress works.
I have to imagine that if these people weren’t out there – even the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who’s only a few notches more in tune with reality – even if he wasn’t out there, if we had somebody more reasonable in charge of the NRA, I’d have to imagine that we would have a more logical debate.
JH: Wayne LaPierre warned that in a second term, Obama would try to take Americans’ guns. He’s not, this is the mainstream voice of the gun lobby, not the fringe, like Gun Owners of America. I think this is the thing that keeps us from addressing this issue, because, in reality, of course, gun control advocates today aren’t calling for firearms to be banned or confiscated.
If you look at what they do push for, they favor closing the gun show loophole. They favor better background checks. A small majority favors banning high-capacity magazines. I wrote a piece for AlterNet.org called, “Yes, We Can Have Sane Gun Control Without Trampling Gun Owners’ Rights.” That piece has links to a bunch of polls of gun owners.
Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Rep shot in the head in 2011, announced this week that she’s raising $20 million for a new organization called Americans for Commonsense Solutions. They’re going to go up against the NRA in terms of campaign donations. We see a normally cautious White House, one that usually shies away from progressive base issues, and they are at least talking aggressively about dealing with this issue.
Your view? Any chance we’ll see progress?
ASW: I’m optimistic in the long term. I don’t know if we’ll get anything immediately. I look at the filibuster in the Senate, and with 60 votes needed there it's really difficult to imagine much happening. Of course, you have the House of Representatives, where I don’t think you’ll get any kind of gun legislation even brought to the floor.
But I think there has been a fundamental shift in the political debate, the political consciousness around gun control. Democrats are finally taking it seriously. They’re finally standing up and addressing this, which is long overdue.
I think what’s going to be needed is for somebody like Michael Bloomberg, or somebody with deep pockets -- unfortunately, this is the way our politics work – to finance a powerful movement, because the NRA right now is extremely powerful.
One positive bit of news, I think, on the NRA is they’ve gotten complacent. Because we haven’t had a gun control debate in the past 10 years, I think they’ve become irrelevant in a way that most people don’t realize, in that Republicans are going to vote pro-gun, no matter what, while Democrats are increasingly alienated from the NRA. You have them just appealing to their base, with these crank theories, like we saw in the press conference that Wayne LaPierre gave. I think that’s put them in a weaker position than a lot of people realize, and they just haven’t been tested yet.
Hopefully, if there is some kind of fight and they are tested, we’ll see that there’s actually more support out there, but it’s going to take some time.
JH: Getting back to their nutty arguments, what do you think about the ubiquitous push for more guns, for arming teachers? Wayne LaPierre put it best when he said, “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Your view of all of this?
ASW: Yes. I spent a lot of time looking into this. I started getting interested in it after reading an article in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg. This was a 7,000-word piece headlined, “The Case for More Guns.”
He laid it out the argument in pretty convincing terms, but then he conveniently did not quote any actual gun violence researchers. I talked to a bunch of them. Actually, if you look at the data, the empirical evidence that’s out there -- and there is a good amount of empirical evidence – you look at other countries, you look at comparisons between states with different gun restrictions, and it is uncontroversial, completely unquestionable and absolutely false that more guns leads to less crime. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Just one case study that I think is really illuminating here. In Australia, there was a mass shooting, where 35 people were killed. Within weeks, the conservative government passed an assault weapon ban, a much stronger assault weapon ban than we had, including a gun buy back. They actually made it illegal to hold these guns, and they bought them back from the population. Homicide with guns dropped 60 percent in the next decade, and there was no associated rise in crime by other means. This is a common talking point that, if criminals don’t have guns, they’ll just turn to knives or even hammers. There was none of that, and there hasn’t been a single mass shooting in the decade since they passed this law.
There’s no question that gun control is effective, and it’s at least worth trying, but we can’t even talk about it now.
JH: People can also take a peek at a piece in the New York Times last Sunday titled, “More guns equal more killing.” It does seem pretty incontrovertible.
I spoke recently with a Vietnam vet who had seen quite a bit of action. He told me, "Look, when you come under an ambush" -- which is what these things are, they’re always surprise attacks; we’re not expecting people to jump out with Bushmasters at school or in a movie theater -- he said, "When you come under an ambush, the hardest thing to teach troops is fire discipline. The instinct is to start shooting around wildly. You’re under fire, there are bullets whipping around you. That’s the instinct."
If you think about this idea, that if you just have a lot of gun-toting citizens without combat training in these scenes, that that’s going to stop these mass killings, it just defies the experience of military tacticians.
And my friend said that when they set up an ambush, they would expect the enemy to incur friendly fire -- that enemy troops would shoot each other in that mad scramble, that panic when you have the adrenaline pumping. Then you add another element to it in these mass shooting situations, which is that police arrive on the scene -- if you have six different people with guns out, what do they do? Whom do they shoot?
ASW: Yes, in 2009 after the Virginia Tech shootings, ABC News, or 20/20, did an amazing experiment that I would encourage everyone to take a look at. They recreated a situation where you had a gun in a school shooting.
They trained a dozen people, a dozen volunteers. They gave them more training than is required by most states for concealed carry permits. They told them, “Later today, a gunman is going to come in. You have the only gun in the room. You need to fight them off.”
They knew it was coming, which of course is not going to happen in real life. In every single case, even in the cases where they had volunteers who had years of gun experience on the range, every single one of them got shot. Fortunately, they were using paint balls, so they didn’t actually get hurt. Several of them shot other civilians. Not a single one of them was able to shoot the killer.
If you have any experience, even playing paintball, you realize this is totally absurd and not going to work. Just like today, unfortunately, we had another school shooting in California. At that school, there was a sheriff’s deputy there, 24 hours a day, or at least as long as there’s school in session. The shooting still happened.
Having somebody with a gun at the place of a mass killing just doesn’t mean that they can stop the killer.
JH: There was also an armed guard at Columbine High School. There was also a man with a concealed carry permit at the site of Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting. He turned the corner, and he said that he came very, very close to shooting one of the people who had tackled the actual shooter and wrestled his gun away. He actually was extremely grateful that he had shown the restraint to not open fire. In the situation, he had a very limited picture of what had been going on. This is real life.
I think a lot of this is driven by the culture. There’s a culture of gun violence. We’ve all met people who fetishize guns and firearms, as opposed to seeing them as tools, like the responsible gun owner should do.
Obviously it comes from TV, and the movies, and all that. There is a significant culture in this country that just equates gun ownership with machismo. Bushmaster famously had that ad, “Your Man Card Has Been Reissued.”
ASW: Yes, absolutely. One of the gun researchers that I spoke to told me, “It was a James Bond fantasy to think you could fight off a killer.” If you’ll remember, just before the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a shooting at a mall in Oregon, in the Clackamas Mall. You had an almost perfect situation for what the gun proponents imagine.
There was a guy, with a concealed carry permit, he was within range of the shooter. The shooter’s gun had jammed, so he was distracted. The guy ducked behind a column, pulled his gun out, and was ready to fire, had a clean shot at the shooter but then he saw that there was a woman behind him. He was afraid of shooting the woman who was trying to crawl away from the shooter. He said he never regretted that. That’s another case where a guy was on the scene with a gun, but couldn’t do it because it would’ve caused more harm than good.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
It's so easy to call things names when people don't want to really look at or understand the connecting the dots, as conspiracy theories...words used by the press to stop all discussion of inconvenient issues.
Joyce Riley (R.N., BSN; Spokesperson, American Gulf War Veterans Association) interviews Mike Powers
Former US Naval Law Enforcement Veteran and US Army Infantry/Reconnaissance Military Veteran. Powers has found glaring inconsistencies regarding the Sandy Hook shooting and breaks it down for the audience. It's important to understand that this is the elephant in the living room. Begin at 8 minutes to avoid intro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=SK8tLX6VQp4
And as far as the below article throwing in the 911, in this beautifully produced, 90-minute documentary, over 40 scientific experts share their professional insights about the events of 9/11. https://video.cpt12.org/video/2270078138
In addition to 1,500 architects and engineers who are calling for a new, impartial investigation of 9/11, over 1,000 government and military officials, professors, pilots, and 9/11 survivors and family members have publicly stated that the 9/11 Commission Report is fatally flawed. Among these respected individuals are two former U.S. Senators, a former FBI director, the former president of Italy, and many more. So do you want to call all these people conspiracy theorists?
The history of the United States is full of corporations conspiring to fix prices, eliminate competition and control citizens constitutional rights, and force agendas for their own benefit. I'm so grateful that people are questioning circumstances, looking at inconsistencies, tracking the patterns and distrusting a government who has gone out-of-control...4 trillion dollars...puff!
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AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
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'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
A vile conspiracy theory is gaining traction in the gun rights community.
January 14, 2013
There's been no shortage of delusional claims made by the gun manufacturers' lobby and its allies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Usually, they revolve around macho fantasies of gun owners heroically keeping their cool during surprise attacks, taking down mad gunmen without killing onlookers or being shot by arriving police. In the real world, of course, these are the kinds of people who tend to shoot themselves while shopping for milk at Walmart, rummaging around in their purses for lipstick or sleeping (sleeping can be really dangerous).
But last week, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported that a far more disturbing delusion is gaining traction on the fringes of the “gun rights” movement. Seitz-Wald calls them “Sandy Hook Truthers,” and he appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss the phenomenon. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show here).
Joshua Holland: Alex, Talking Points Memo reported this week that Joe Biden has given some hints of the recommendations that his Gun Control Task Force might offer as soon as next week. They're talking about banning high-capacity magazines and mandating universal background checks. Did you know that as many as 40 percent of all firearm sales in this country are done without a background check?
Alex Seitz-Wald: Yes. It’s really unbelievable. This is the so-called “gun show loophole,” but it extends way beyond gun shows. I can go online on Craigslist right now and find a gun and buy it, without any kind of background check or oversight.
JH: Any private citizen who’s not a licensed firearms dealer can just sell a gun to anybody without doing anything. It’s just crazy.
Anyway, we’re going to have a big fight on our hands against one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, the NRA, which represents the interests of firearms’ manufacturers. That fight is only coming, really, because 20 young children were cut down with a Bushmaster at a Connecticut school. That brings us to your report this week on Salon.com, which I found mindblowing. Alex, tell us about the worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory out there.
ASW: Yes. This is really unbelievable -- I could hardly believe it myself, but we all know about 9/11 truthers by now. These are the people who thought that 9/11 was an inside job. Now these folks -- I’m calling them the “Sandy Hook truthers” -- these are people, and there’s a surprising number of them, who think that the Sandy Hook massacre either didn’t happen or did happen, but was perpetrated by maybe government agents or crazy liberals.
There are different versions of the theory, all in an attempt to create a national movement for gun control. Obama or somebody killed all these little kids in order to get you and me to talk about guns and get the American people interested in gun control.
This was out there for a little while, but then it really picked up steam after they latched onto a girl named Emily Parker. She was a 6-year-old who was killed, and her father has been pretty active in the media. There was a funeral service in Utah, where the governor spoke, and that got a lot of attention. A photo emerged of her sister, sitting on Obama’s lap when he went and visited the family. The girl is wearing the same dress that Emily was wearing in a photo that the family had distributed to the media. To the Internet conspiracy theorists, it must be the same girl. Emily Parker must be alive! Therefore, the whole thing was a hoax.
There’s a YouTube video that lays this all out, and it’s already gotten over 130,000 views. If you look elsewhere, you can find all kinds of Web sites, and blog posts, and forum messages, where people lay this out. They have all kinds of other crazy things about the car being not the one owned by Adam Lanza, and police audio allegedly suggesting there were multiple shooters in the building.
We all know there was tons of confusion on the day of the shooting and a lot of misreporting happened early on, but instead of them dismissing this as the kind of confusion that happens when a terribly disturbing event like this takes place, they latched onto these little things to create this grand construction.
The worst thing, for me, is that they’re denying the grief of these families, these poor parents who had their kids killed. They’re saying it’s all for show and some of them actually want to prosecute the parents for allegedly being actors and accomplices to this crime.
JH: It’s remarkable that people could be so shameless. Do you not have the basic common decency to leave grieving parents alone? It’s amazing.
The evidence – this is very typical, by the way. I’ve seen it with 9/11 Truthers. In the early moments of a big news story -- a big, confusing, breaking news story -- there are always, always, always conflicting details.
Alex, who’s behind this? Who started this? Do you know who’s pushing this?
ASW: It’s really hard to tell. That video that I mentioned was actually made by a production company that produced the film, Operation Terror, which was a really popular 9/11 truther film. It’s a fictionalized version of the truther theory. It’s the exact same people that did the 9/11 truther stuff.
The rest of them seem to be just your run-of-the-mill, Internet cranks. I talked to one of the guys, actually. This is the guy who started it, so he’s really invested here, and has rounded up all the different pieces and put them all in one place. I thought I’d email him and see if he'd respond. I figured he wouldn’t, but he did. I was really disturbed, actually, by the response. I should mention, on his Web site in the About section, he gives himself some credibility by saying, “I’m the only person in the World to solve Lost,” as in the TV show.
JH: (laughs)
ASW: When I emailed him, I asked him about that. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t want to diagnose anybody, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he is having some kind of delusions.
He told me that he launched his Web site on December 21st, which is a significant day. He said – and I’m reading here from his email – “Since I am the new-age Messiah, and the revelation from the Goddess, Tefnut, AKA Ma’at of Egypt, I thought the date was significant.”
This guy, who’s leading this online conspiracy movement, literally thinks he is the new-age Messiah. The word “crazy” gets tossed around a lot, but I think this guy meets a clinical definition of delusions. This is where a lot of this stuff is coming from.
The wild thing, to me, is that you’re only a few steps removed from the other kinds of people that we call “crazy,” but that are intimately involved in the gun debate. Larry Pratt, the head of Gun Owners of America, which is a more radical version of the NRA, he hasn’t said anything quite like this about the Sandy Hook shooting. But after Aurora, he told Alex Jones -- who’s a big conspiracy theorist -- he told Alex Jones that there was a really good chance that government agents perpetrated the Aurora massacre, in order to implement gun control. This is a real thing that’s out there.
There’s a professor at Florida Atlantic University who even got involved in this. It’s really easy to dismiss, but I don’t think we should because it can go, really quickly, from the guy who claims he solved Lost to people who are actually involved in the gun control debate.
JH: It starts with someone who has, it seems, mental health issues. Then all these other people jump in because it’s ideologically convenient. Alex, is this like global warming denialism, just pretending that inconvenient realities don’t exist?
ASW: Yes, I think it is. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, I think, explains so much of this here, which is basically the idea that you have a belief in your head, and any information that contradicts that belief causes stress, and is immediately discredited. You don’t, for a second, consider the possibility that it could be legitimate. You immediately assume that it has to be wrong because it doesn’t comport with your world view.
That’s how all, pretty much all conspiracy theories work, or things that deny reality in the face of evidence, like global warming. I think you’re just getting an extreme case of it here.
JH: To some degree, a lot of conservative, ideological positions are based on that same thing. People who score high on the scale of authoritarian personality types are especially sensitive to cognitive dissonance. They’re the ones who are most likely to grab onto any straw, which will get them out of that stress. Anyway, this conspiracy is supposedly all in the service of conditioning the population to give up their guns.
Alex, what do you think the conversation about guns would look like, in this country, if not for the paranoia, widespread on the right, that someone wants to take Americans’ guns?
ASW: Boy, it’s hard to imagine. It’s really incredible how much this tiny faction of people has dominated the debate. If you ask most Americans about the Assault Weapon Ban or High Capacity Magazine Ban, they’re all for it. This is after Democrats and most liberals have ceded the issue for the past 10 years.
We’ve hardly really had much of a gun control debate at all. Most of what you hear out there is misinformation about the Assault Weapon Ban, but Americans are for it, to the tune of 60 percent. Whether we can get something in Congress is a different matter because of the bizarre way that Congress works.
I have to imagine that if these people weren’t out there – even the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who’s only a few notches more in tune with reality – even if he wasn’t out there, if we had somebody more reasonable in charge of the NRA, I’d have to imagine that we would have a more logical debate.
JH: Wayne LaPierre warned that in a second term, Obama would try to take Americans’ guns. He’s not, this is the mainstream voice of the gun lobby, not the fringe, like Gun Owners of America. I think this is the thing that keeps us from addressing this issue, because, in reality, of course, gun control advocates today aren’t calling for firearms to be banned or confiscated.
If you look at what they do push for, they favor closing the gun show loophole. They favor better background checks. A small majority favors banning high-capacity magazines. I wrote a piece for AlterNet.org called, “Yes, We Can Have Sane Gun Control Without Trampling Gun Owners’ Rights.” That piece has links to a bunch of polls of gun owners.
Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Rep shot in the head in 2011, announced this week that she’s raising $20 million for a new organization called Americans for Commonsense Solutions. They’re going to go up against the NRA in terms of campaign donations. We see a normally cautious White House, one that usually shies away from progressive base issues, and they are at least talking aggressively about dealing with this issue.
Your view? Any chance we’ll see progress?
ASW: I’m optimistic in the long term. I don’t know if we’ll get anything immediately. I look at the filibuster in the Senate, and with 60 votes needed there it's really difficult to imagine much happening. Of course, you have the House of Representatives, where I don’t think you’ll get any kind of gun legislation even brought to the floor.
But I think there has been a fundamental shift in the political debate, the political consciousness around gun control. Democrats are finally taking it seriously. They’re finally standing up and addressing this, which is long overdue.
I think what’s going to be needed is for somebody like Michael Bloomberg, or somebody with deep pockets -- unfortunately, this is the way our politics work – to finance a powerful movement, because the NRA right now is extremely powerful.
One positive bit of news, I think, on the NRA is they’ve gotten complacent. Because we haven’t had a gun control debate in the past 10 years, I think they’ve become irrelevant in a way that most people don’t realize, in that Republicans are going to vote pro-gun, no matter what, while Democrats are increasingly alienated from the NRA. You have them just appealing to their base, with these crank theories, like we saw in the press conference that Wayne LaPierre gave. I think that’s put them in a weaker position than a lot of people realize, and they just haven’t been tested yet.
Hopefully, if there is some kind of fight and they are tested, we’ll see that there’s actually more support out there, but it’s going to take some time.
JH: Getting back to their nutty arguments, what do you think about the ubiquitous push for more guns, for arming teachers? Wayne LaPierre put it best when he said, “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Your view of all of this?
ASW: Yes. I spent a lot of time looking into this. I started getting interested in it after reading an article in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg. This was a 7,000-word piece headlined, “The Case for More Guns.”
He laid it out the argument in pretty convincing terms, but then he conveniently did not quote any actual gun violence researchers. I talked to a bunch of them. Actually, if you look at the data, the empirical evidence that’s out there -- and there is a good amount of empirical evidence – you look at other countries, you look at comparisons between states with different gun restrictions, and it is uncontroversial, completely unquestionable and absolutely false that more guns leads to less crime. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Just one case study that I think is really illuminating here. In Australia, there was a mass shooting, where 35 people were killed. Within weeks, the conservative government passed an assault weapon ban, a much stronger assault weapon ban than we had, including a gun buy back. They actually made it illegal to hold these guns, and they bought them back from the population. Homicide with guns dropped 60 percent in the next decade, and there was no associated rise in crime by other means. This is a common talking point that, if criminals don’t have guns, they’ll just turn to knives or even hammers. There was none of that, and there hasn’t been a single mass shooting in the decade since they passed this law.
There’s no question that gun control is effective, and it’s at least worth trying, but we can’t even talk about it now.
JH: People can also take a peek at a piece in the New York Times last Sunday titled, “More guns equal more killing.” It does seem pretty incontrovertible.
I spoke recently with a Vietnam vet who had seen quite a bit of action. He told me, "Look, when you come under an ambush" -- which is what these things are, they’re always surprise attacks; we’re not expecting people to jump out with Bushmasters at school or in a movie theater -- he said, "When you come under an ambush, the hardest thing to teach troops is fire discipline. The instinct is to start shooting around wildly. You’re under fire, there are bullets whipping around you. That’s the instinct."
If you think about this idea, that if you just have a lot of gun-toting citizens without combat training in these scenes, that that’s going to stop these mass killings, it just defies the experience of military tacticians.
And my friend said that when they set up an ambush, they would expect the enemy to incur friendly fire -- that enemy troops would shoot each other in that mad scramble, that panic when you have the adrenaline pumping. Then you add another element to it in these mass shooting situations, which is that police arrive on the scene -- if you have six different people with guns out, what do they do? Whom do they shoot?
ASW: Yes, in 2009 after the Virginia Tech shootings, ABC News, or 20/20, did an amazing experiment that I would encourage everyone to take a look at. They recreated a situation where you had a gun in a school shooting.
They trained a dozen people, a dozen volunteers. They gave them more training than is required by most states for concealed carry permits. They told them, “Later today, a gunman is going to come in. You have the only gun in the room. You need to fight them off.”
They knew it was coming, which of course is not going to happen in real life. In every single case, even in the cases where they had volunteers who had years of gun experience on the range, every single one of them got shot. Fortunately, they were using paint balls, so they didn’t actually get hurt. Several of them shot other civilians. Not a single one of them was able to shoot the killer.
If you have any experience, even playing paintball, you realize this is totally absurd and not going to work. Just like today, unfortunately, we had another school shooting in California. At that school, there was a sheriff’s deputy there, 24 hours a day, or at least as long as there’s school in session. The shooting still happened.
Having somebody with a gun at the place of a mass killing just doesn’t mean that they can stop the killer.
JH: There was also an armed guard at Columbine High School. There was also a man with a concealed carry permit at the site of Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting. He turned the corner, and he said that he came very, very close to shooting one of the people who had tackled the actual shooter and wrestled his gun away. He actually was extremely grateful that he had shown the restraint to not open fire. In the situation, he had a very limited picture of what had been going on. This is real life.
I think a lot of this is driven by the culture. There’s a culture of gun violence. We’ve all met people who fetishize guns and firearms, as opposed to seeing them as tools, like the responsible gun owner should do.
Obviously it comes from TV, and the movies, and all that. There is a significant culture in this country that just equates gun ownership with machismo. Bushmaster famously had that ad, “Your Man Card Has Been Reissued.”
ASW: Yes, absolutely. One of the gun researchers that I spoke to told me, “It was a James Bond fantasy to think you could fight off a killer.” If you’ll remember, just before the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a shooting at a mall in Oregon, in the Clackamas Mall. You had an almost perfect situation for what the gun proponents imagine.
There was a guy, with a concealed carry permit, he was within range of the shooter. The shooter’s gun had jammed, so he was distracted. The guy ducked behind a column, pulled his gun out, and was ready to fire, had a clean shot at the shooter but then he saw that there was a woman behind him. He was afraid of shooting the woman who was trying to crawl away from the shooter. He said he never regretted that. That’s another case where a guy was on the scene with a gun, but couldn’t do it because it would’ve caused more harm than good.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
This Sandy Hook "truth" stuff is utter BS. Apparently, there is no conspiracy theory crazy enough to not be bought by some because the narrative fits their paranoid and dis-empowered worldview.
Scott
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by geomancer:
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
For an even more nuanced view that bypasses disinformationists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=SK8tLX6VQp4
And in doing some web searching, I just found out that Ted Gunderson, former chief agent of FBI in LA, Memphis and Dallas and whistleblower, died in the summer of '11 of bladder cancer due to arsenic poisoning. His doctor, Dr. Edward Lucidi, states he feels it was intentional poisoning. https://www.knowthelies.com/node/6764 Ted was personally at my home 10 years ago discussing what you want to call conspiracy theories right after the 911. I feel deep grief for this very brave soul in all that he brought forth and risked his life over and over to expose in how the government really works. I pray that the world will wake up. https://www.knowthelies.com/node/6764
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by geomancer:
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by sharingwisdom:
Unfortunately, I spent way too much time reviewing this nonsense. (BTW...this thread is about the Sandy Hook incident, not 9/11). Does anyone in this "conscious community" seriously believe that the Government, or some version of a shadow Government, either purposely murdered 20 kids at Sandy Hook and staged an elaborate cover up, or faked the whole thing along with a mind-bogglingly complicated cover up, just so it could impose tougher gun restriction laws?
This is pure paranoid delusional BS that needs to be called out.
Scott
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Just your opinion, Scott. This military officer was there investigating. You weren't. He never said it didn't happen. He said there were alot of inconsistencies and pointed them out very clearly. I've already posted the video on the 911 from 1500 architects, engineers etc.
Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. ~Plato (427 BC)
The general population doesn’t even know what’s happening and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know~ Noam Chomsky
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown:
Unfortunately, I spent way too much time reviewing this nonsense. (BTW...this thread is about the Sandy Hook incident, not 9/11). Does anyone in this "conscious community" seriously believe that the Government, or some version of a shadow Government, either purposely murdered 20 kids at Sandy Hook and staged an elaborate cover up, or faked the whole thing along with a mind-bogglingly complicated cover up, just so it could impose tougher gun restriction laws?
This is pure paranoid delusional BS that needs to be called out.
Scott
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by sharingwisdom:
Just your opinion, Scott.
No, it is not just my opinion.
So you are seriously stating here publicly that those kids in Sandy Hook were intentionally murdered by the Government (or some form of shadow Government) as part of a conspiracy to get tougher gun laws passed? And apparently with the massive complicity of the mainstream media?
Really?
Because that is what the "Sandy Hook Truthers" are saying and it is what this "military officer" is clearly implying, who you are so strongly defending.
Unfortunately, I did take too much time to listen to this "military officer" and it's a classic example of someone trying to create a lot of confusion without making an actual coherent case, with the intention that the "critical thinking challenged" will connect dots that aren't there and jump to accepting an overarching false narrative. It's pure crap, as is any claim that those kids were murdered as part of a large conspiracy. (By the way, this "military officer" wasn't really "there" either.)
Please...taking seriously this ludicrous paranoid thinking is an example of what discredits the progressive movement to a majority of Americans. It's one thing to put out a variety of alternative information for digestion, but in this case I just couldn't let this absurd contention stand as accepted in this forum without it being challenged.
Scott
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
So you are seriously stating here publically that you think that the media story is correct and that there are no false flag operations, that the 911 commission was truthful, and the government is full of integrity even as it stole 4 trillion dollars?
Really?
I've already posted many links that show a great difference of what you and some others believe. I'm not interested in being put into a box called progressive, any box at all for that matter. But you're welcome to wear it. I also listened to the officer and it was very clear to me and millions of others.
I think paranoid thinking is believing the 5 corporations who own the media w/o deep discernment. And I'm not interested in challenging this issue anymore. I've posted plenty of sites that for me and others bring a thoughtful process of discernment and decision. So we are just going to agree to disagree.
I wish you the best in all your decisions.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown:
No, it is not just my opinion.
So you are seriously stating here publicly that those kids in Sandy Hook were intentionally murdered by the Government (or some form of shadow Government) as part of a conspiracy to get tougher gun laws passed? And apparently with the massive complicity of the mainstream media?
Really?
Because that is what the "Sandy Hook Truthers" are saying and it is what this "military officer" is clearly implying, who you are so strongly defending.
Unfortunately, I did take too much time to listen to this "military officer" and it's a classic example of someone trying to create a lot of confusion without making an actual coherent case, with the intention that the "critical thinking challenged" will connect dots that aren't there and jump to accepting an overarching false narrative. It's pure crap, as is any claim that those kids were murdered as part of a large conspiracy. (By the way, this "military officer" wasn't really "there" either.)
Please...taking seriously this ludicrous paranoid thinking is an example of what discredits the progressive movement to a majority of Americans. It's one thing to put out a variety of alternative information for digestion, but in this case I just couldn't let this absurd contention stand as accepted in this forum without it being challenged.
Scott
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by sharingwisdom:
So you are seriously stating here publically that you think that the media story is correct and that there are no false flag operations, that the 911 commission was truthful, and the government is full of integrity even as it stole 4 trillion dollars?
Really?
First...please stop injecting other incidents which are not part of this discussion thread and assuming my views about them. I've only commented about Sandy Hook, not about 9/11 or anything else. If you are going to personally respond to me, then please respond to the position I've actually taken and do not jump to some completely different subject and make up my position about it. (One wonders if such a hyper-jump of the subject is not a revealing example of a kind of thought process that might lead someone to believe the Sandy Hook "Truth" conspiracy to begin with.)
Second...and yes, as a matter of fact, I am indeed seriously stating here publicly that I think the entire national media that reported on the Sandy Hook incident were NOT part of a massive coordinated conspiracy with the Government (and also, apparently, with all the local law enforcement and emergency response agencies) to purposely murder 20 school children under a "false flag operation" and then pull off an unimaginably complicated cover up...all just so Obama can impose tougher gun controls.
That is exactly what I am saying.
It's sad to me how some people can seriously buy into this craziness -- including in this forum. I imagine it must feel very scary and disempowered to live in the dark and fearful world of the "Sandy Hook Truthers".
Let me say again -- it's one thing to put out a variety of alternative information for digestion, but in this case I just couldn't let this absurd contention stand as accepted in this forum without it being challenged. A challenge, I might add, that I did not originally make personal, but rather a challenge to the idea.
Scott
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Posted without comment
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/n...pagewanted=all
Reliving Horror and Faint Hope at Massacre Site
https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images...ticleLarge.jpgKarsten Moran for The New York Times
Early responders at Sandy Hook Elementary included, from left: Lt. Christopher Vanghele, Officer Jason Flynn, Officer Leonard Penna, Detective Jason Frank and Officer William Chapman.
NEWTOWN, Conn. — The gunfire ended; it was so quiet they could hear the broken glass and bullet casings scraping under their boots. The smell of gunpowder filled the air. The officers turned down their radios; they did not want to give away their positions if there was still a gunman present.
They found the two women first, their bodies lying on the lobby floor. Now they knew it was real. But nothing, no amount of training, could prepare them for what they found next, inside those two classrooms.
“One look, and your life was absolutely changed,” said Michael McGowan, one of the first police officers to arrive at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, as a gunman, in the space of minutes, killed 20 first graders and 6 adults.
Officer McGowan was among seven Newtown officers who recently sat down to share their accounts of that day. Some spoke for the first time, providing the fullest account yet of the scene as officers responded to one of the worst school massacres in United States history, one that has inflamed the national debate over gun control.
It is an account filled with ghastly moments and details, and a few faint instances of hope. One child had a slight pulse, but did not survive. Another was found bloody but unhurt, amid her dead classmates. Teachers were so protective of their students that they had to be coaxed by officers before opening doors. And the officers themselves, many of them fathers, instinctively used their most soothing Daddy voices to guide terrified children to safety.
The stories also reveal the deep stress that lingers for officers who, until Dec. 14, had focused their energies on maintaining order in a low-crime corner of suburbia. Some can barely sleep. Little things can set off tears: a television show, a child’s laughter, even the piles of gifts the Police Department received from across the country.
One detective, who was driving with his wife and two sons, passed a roadside memorial on Route 25 two weeks after the shooting, and began sobbing uncontrollably. “I just lost it right there, I couldn’t even drive,” the detective, Jason Frank, said.
Officer William Chapman was in the Newtown police station along with Officer McGowan and others when the first reports of shots and breaking glass came in early on the day of the massacre. The school was more than two miles away. They traveled up Route 25, then right onto Church Hill Road. “We drove as fast as we’ve ever driven,” Officer McGowan said.
They made it in under three minutes, arriving in the parking lot while gunfire could still be heard.
“I got out of the car and grabbed my rifle and it stopped for second,” Officer Chapman said. “But then we heard more popping. You could tell it was rifle fire. And it was up so close, it sounded like it was coming from outside. So we were all looking around for someone to shoot back at.”
As the officers converged on the building, the gunfire stopped again. Officers Chapman and Scott Smith made their way to the front entrance. It was here, only minutes earlier, that a rail-thin 20-year-old named Adam Lanza, armed with a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic carbine, two semiautomatic pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, had blasted his way through the glass.
Leonard Penna, a school resource officer who had raced to the scene from his office at the Newtown Middle School, entered the school with Sgt. Aaron Bahamonde and Lt. Christopher Vanghele, through a side door that leads to the boiler room, he said. Officer McGowan and two other officers entered through a locked rear door. One of them knocked out the glass with his rifle butt so the rest of the officers could get in.
The halls were familiar to Officer McGowan. He attended the school as a child. But now, they were eerily silent.
“The teachers were doing a phenomenal job keeping their kids quiet,” Officer Chapman said.
The officers turned their radios down. They entered the front lobby and saw the first bodies, those of Dawn Hochsprung, the principal, they would later learn, and Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist.
“You saw them lifeless, laying down,” Officer Penna recalled. “For a split second, your mind says could this be a mock crime scene, could this be fake, but in the next split second, you’re saying, there is no way. This is real.”
The officers went from room to room, urgently hunting for the killer before he could do more harm.
They found a wounded staff member in one room, made sure her co-workers were applying proper first aid and moved on.
As Officers Chapman and Smith approached the second classroom in the hallway on their left, they spotted a rifle on the floor. Inside, they found the gunman, Adam Lanza, dead by his own hand, along with the bodies of several children and other adults.
The officers searched the room for any other gunmen, then began searching for signs of life among the children. One little girl had a pulse and was breathing. Officer Chapman cradled her in his arms and ran with her outside, to an ambulance. Officer Chapman, a parent himself, tried to comfort her. “You’re safe now; your parents love you,” he recalled saying. She did not survive.
Most of the bodies were found in the classroom next door, where, Detective Frank recalled, “the teacher had them huddled up like a mother hen — simple as that, in a corner.”
Officer Penna, who was the first officer to enter the second room, found a girl standing alone amid the bodies. She appeared to be in shock, and was covered in blood, but had not been injured. He, not knowing the gunman had been found, told her to stay put.
He ran into the next classroom and saw the dead gunman, with Officers Chapman and Smith standing nearby. State troopers and other officers were now flooding in. Officer Penna returned to the second classroom, his rifle slung around his chest, grabbed the uninjured girl by the arm and ran with her out to a triage area set up in the parking lot.
With state troopers coming in, the officers began to evacuate the children who were still behind locked doors. But many of the teachers, seeking to protect their students and following their own training, refused to open up.
“We’re kicking the doors, yelling ‘Police! Police!’ ” Officer McGowan said. “We were ripping our badges off and putting them up to the window.”
Detective Frank, who had been off duty and rushed to the scene so quickly that he had to borrow a gun from a colleague once he arrived, remembers ripping the handle off one of the doors, “just trying to get through.”
As the children emerged, the officers tried to reassure them. “Everything is fine now,” they said, even as they stayed alert for a possible second gunman. “Everybody hold hands, close your eyes,” they told the children.
Some officers formed a human curtain around the bodies of Ms. Hochsprung and Ms. Sherlach, to shield the children from the sight as they filed past. Others blocked the doorways of the two classrooms.
As the scene settled that day, officers standing guard outside warned newly arriving colleagues not to go in if they had children. Detective Joe Joudy, one of the senior members of the force, spotted Officer Chapman walking back to the building, covered in blood. “I was a mess, and he looks at me and says, ‘They’ve got to get you guys out of here,’ ” Officer Chapman said.
Newtown’s three-man detective squad, which also included Dan McAnaspie, would spend much of the next week working with the State Police to collect and inventory every bit of evidence from the crime scene.
“Words can’t describe how horrible it was,” said Detective Joudy, who has been with the department for 27 years.
As he left the building that day, Officer Tom Bean, who had also been off duty when he rushed to the scene, realized he had not told his wife where he was. He fumbled for his phone in the parking lot, and called her. “That’s when I broke down in tears, crying,” he said.
More than a month later, the officers continue to feel the pain of that day. Some spoke reluctantly, not wanting to compare their torment with the agony of the families of the children and adult victims. But they also worried about their ability to do their jobs, as they continue to suffer. They said they omitted some details out of sensitivity to the victims, and to protect the investigation as it continued.
At least one person, Officer Bean, said he has already received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he had been unable to return to work since the shootings, and had needed medication to sleep.
The officers and their union are reaching out to state lawmakers, hoping to expand workers’ compensation benefits to include those who witness horrific violence.
“Our concern from the beginning has been the effects of PTSD,” said Eric Brown, a lawyer for the union that represents the Newtown police. “We estimate it is probably going to be 12 to 15 Newtown officers who are going to be dealing with that, for the remainder of their careers, we imagine, from what we’ve been told by professionals who deal with PTSD.”
For Detective Frank, who spent days sequestered in the school, meticulously collecting evidence, the images keep recurring — and not just of the children. The monster-truck backpack he found that was identical to his 6-year-old’s. The Christmas ornaments that sat unfinished, drying on the windowsill.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “These kids will never take those ornaments home to their parents.”
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Seeing the word "truther," I am reminded of when it was invented to disparage those who demanded the truth about the 9/11 attacks. These were respectable, knowledgeable people who were disgusted and appalled by the blatant abuse of political and media power to deceive the public - and by how effective that deception was. Who would disparage those demanding the truth? Seems pretty obvious it would be those who don't want the truth known, who want to capitalize on the false picture they have disseminated. More than anything else, seeing this word associated with the Sandy Hook shootings causes me to question the media-propagated story and to wonder if, once again, there is a larger truth being concealed.
9/11 taught many of us to question all "official" accounts, even when the alternative is horrific to contemplate. But the fact that a scenario causes us great distress to consider doesn't mean we should reject it for a more palatable one. Personally, I'd rather be lumped with the "truthers" than go along with those who have been known to commit brazen acts of mass death and destruction for their fear-instilling effects on the public. Democracy and freedom cannot exist in an environment of deception, paranoia and misdirected blame.
C. Summer
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
Fringe belief systems often get labeled with insulting nicknames by their opponents. I am reminded of my own family history - most people now know members of the Society of Friends as Quakers, an insult in its day (we called our services Friend's Meeting). Same for the Shakers - their proper name is/was United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearance (had to look that one up). Or Wobblies for the Industrial Workers of the World. The list goes on.
So if you are going against the grain, it doesn't pay to have such sensitive feelings, because you'll not get much sympathy from the rest of us. So, suck it up, let your freak flag fly and say it, say it loud: "I'm a Truther and Proud"
Richard
Re: 'Sandy Hook Truthers' Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max
I think something may have gotten lost in our communication, Richard, as it really has nothing to do with belief systems or any concerns about how someone might label me personally. Let me see if I can say it in another way:
When I first heard the news about the Sandy Hook school shootings, i was of course somewhat shocked and saddened. Later, when I heard that some were questioning the veracity of the official account, I thought - but of course, we've been here before. Let's think twice before assuming the media story is the truth. Many of us learned this after 9/11/01, when reputable and knowledgeable people with no ax to grind against the government pointed out the blatant inconsistencies between the official story and what could easily be observed. So there was an obvious cover-up and a deliberate effort was made to obstruct any real investigation. The inescapable conclusions are that elements within the government - even at the highest levels - were involved in the planning and perpetration of the so-called "terrorist attacks," and that they were done for their effects on public attitudes and opinions.
I'm not saying that any of this applies to the Sandy Hook shootings, but there are some similarities: an incident that most people would find deeply disturbing is reported by the corporate media. The official account is called into question by people who point out what could be a government agenda behind the incident. Then we see articles like the one that started this thread in which the words are crafted to discount and discredit anyone who questions the official story.
Perhaps you've seen the bumper sticker that says: "Question Authority." Given our experience with authority figures in this country, many of us seriously question anything they are reported to say. We are pretty fed up with being lied to in an attempt to manipulate our feelings and opinions. We have bought out of the dominant cult and find ourselves extremely distrustful of its leaders. So, we may be the fringe non-believers, and I'd like to think that fringe is growing all the time.
CSummer
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by geomancer:
Fringe belief systems often get labeled with insulting nicknames by their opponents. I am reminded of my own family history - most people now know members of the Society of Friends as Quakers, an insult in its day (we called our services Friend's Meeting). Same for the Shakers - their proper name is/was United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearance (had to look that one up). Or Wobblies for the Industrial Workers of the World. The list goes on.
So if you are going against the grain, it doesn't pay to have such sensitive feelings, because you'll not get much sympathy from the rest of us. So, suck it up, let your freak flag fly and say it, say it loud: "I'm a Truther and Proud"
Richard
