Tag: sandy hook massacre
The Lone Star State Is Now The Pro-Death State

The Lone Star State Is Now The Pro-Death State

On May 24, Fox News blasted a headline, "New York City subway crime up 58 percent so far compared to 2021; Hunt for gunman in unprovoked shooting intensifies."

That day, a gunman shot 19 elementary school children and two adults to death in Uvalde, Texas. For the record, the number of homicides on New York City subways this year totals four.

Last year, Houston had at least 473 homicides. New York City, with four times the population, saw only 15 more.

If you want to limit the discussion to the dangers of commuting, consider the spike in road rage homicides in the Lone Star State. Last year, 33 people were shot and killed by angry, unhinged drivers — presumably strangers.

This week in Houston's Harris County, a Nissan SUV reportedly cut off a Chevy Malibu. The driver of the Malibu followed the Nissan, fired several shots, came around again and fired more, killing a passenger.

Just another day on the roads of Texas.

Crime is rising everywhere. Gang violence and demographics certainly influence the statistics. There are mentally ill people across the country, and some can get their hands on weapons of war regardless of local gun control laws.

But there's a sick, cultural thing going on in places like Texas that equate ownership of assault-type weapons with manliness. In truth, give a killing machine to a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair, and she could mow down a line of weightlifters.

The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place 10 years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. But the state of Connecticut responded with a raft of new gun control laws. And the state's representatives in Washington have since pushed, in some cases hollered, for more stringent limitations.

"It's f-ing awful," Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, said on the day of the Uvalde outrage. "And it's just our choice whether we want this to continue."

That's apparently the choice in Texas, where mass shootings in schools, churches and shopping centers fly past the elected leaders' consciences like clouds across the West Texas skies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded to the Uvalde massacre with the words "Horrifically, incomprehensibly." Yes, "horrific," the Houston Post countered, "but the second word Abbott used — 'incomprehensibly' — is just as much cowardice as it is a bald-faced lie."

The governor, with the connivance of the legislature, the editorial said, passed gun "laws so permissive that they've even defied the objections of police chiefs and gun safety instructors." It went on to note that Abbott bragged on Twitter about the 2021 permitless carry bill that lets any eligible Texan carry a gun in public with no license or training — "as though that were progress."

Never mind that polls show 80 percent of Texans wanting universal background checks, which are designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally deranged. But the legislature won't go there. Nothing — not the previous and recent mass shootings in El Paso, Odessa, and Midland — would move them.

The latest paroxysm of gun violence in Texas comes right in time for the planned annual convention in Houston of the National Rifle Association. Abbott will be there, undoubtedly singing their praises, as will the two U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. And the NRA will likely praise them back.

"Heidi and I," Cruz just tweeted, "are fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting in Uvalde."

You can bet that these politicians will continue going on and on about protecting "unborn babies" while giving free rein to those who kill born babies. Texans have much to be proud of, but their growing reputation as the pro-death state is tragic.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Supreme Court Allows Sandy Hook Survivors To Sue Remington Arms

Supreme Court Allows Sandy Hook Survivors To Sue Remington Arms

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that a survivor and relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting can pursue their lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 26 people.

The justices rejected an appeal from Remington Arms that argued it should be shielded by a 2005 federal law preventing most lawsuits against firearms manufacturers when their products are used in crimes.

The case is being watched by gun control advocates, gun rights supporters and gun manufacturers across the country, as it has the potential to provide a roadmap for victims of other mass shootings to circumvent the federal law and sue the makers of firearm.

The court’s order allows the lawsuit filed in Connecticut state court by a survivor and relatives of nine victims who died at the Newtown, Connecticut, school on Dec. 14, 2012, to go forward.

The lawsuit says the Madison, North Carolina-based company should never have sold a weapon as dangerous as the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle to the public. Gunman Adam Lanza used it to kill 20 first graders and six educators. It also alleges Remington targeted younger, at-risk males in marketing and product placement in violent video games. Lanza was 20 years old.

“The families are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld precedent and denied Remington’s latest attempt to avoid accountability,” said Joshua Koskoff, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families.

“We are ready to resume discovery and proceed towards trial in order to shed light on Remington’s profit-driven strategy to expand the AR-15 market and court high-risk users at the expense of Americans’ safety,” he said.

Messages seeking comment were left with a lawyer for Remington Arms on Tuesday.

Before the school shooting, Lanza shot his mother to death at their Newtown home. He killed himself as police arrived at the school. The rifle was legally owned by his mother.

The Connecticut Supreme Court had earlier ruled 4-3 that the lawsuit could proceed for now, citing an exemption in the federal law. The decision overturned a ruling by a trial court judge who dismissed the lawsuit based on the 2005 federal law, named the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

The federal law has been criticized by gun control advocates as being too favorable to gun-makers. It has been cited by other courts that rejected lawsuits against gun-makers and dealers in other high-profile shooting attacks, including the 2012 Colorado movie theater shooting and the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings in 2002.

The National Rifle Association, 10 mainly Republican-led states and 22 Republicans in Congress were among those urging the court to jump into the case and end the lawsuit against Remington.

IMAGE: Mourners listen to a memorial service over a loudspeaker outside Newtown High School for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012, in Newtown, Conn. (AP Photo/David Goldman

VIDEO: Fuming Alex Jones Gives Deposition In Sandy Hook Lawsuit

VIDEO: Fuming Alex Jones Gives Deposition In Sandy Hook Lawsuit

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Alex Jones, founder of the radio program “The Alex Jones Show” and the high-traffic Infowars website, has been a leading promoter of the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012 was a “false flag” and a hoax. The right-wing conspiracy theorist has been battling an abundance of civil lawsuits from family members of people who died in the tragedy, which claimed 26 lives altogether (20 children and six adults). HuffPost has obtained a video of Jones being questioned by attorney Mark Bankston, who is representing plaintiff Scarlett Lewis, one of the people suing Jones.

In the video, Bankston sets out to demonstrate that Jones repeatedly mocked the families of the Sandy Hook victims on his radio show. Jones was asked about the date December 14, 2012—and he couldn’t remember that it was the date of the Sandy Hook shooting. Jones, obviously frustrated, tried to deny that he ridiculed or defamed the families of Sandy Hook parents on his show.

Bankston asked Jones, “You’ve done mocking imitations of Sandy Hook parents crying, correct?” Jones denied that he had, but Bankston went on to show clips of Jones doing exactly that in 2014 and 2016.

After showing Jones the clips, Bankston said, “You realize now, you were mocking  the difficult emotional reactions of people who provably lost their children.” Jones, however, maintained that his statements were not meant “to mock the parents…. It is you that is projecting mocking onto it.”

Bankston also told Jones, “You don’t believe the official story of Sandy Hook. You think there was a cover-up.” And Jones responded that he had a problem with “all gun owners being collectively blamed” for the Sandy Hook shooting and that he still believes there has been “a cover-up of events.”

Comet Conspiracy: Mass Delusion Is Nothing New (But Still Lucrative)

Comet Conspiracy: Mass Delusion Is Nothing New (But Still Lucrative)

How fading and insipid do all Objects accost us that are not conveyed in the Vehicle of Delusion.
— Jonathan Swift, “A Digression Concerning…the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth,” 1704

Americans have always thought themselves a practical, commonsensical people, a nation of Thomas Edisons and Henry Fords. (Never mind that industrial genius Ford was also a political crank whose treatise The International Jew, influenced Nazi race theory.) In reality, we’ve always been a nation of easy marks. As Mencken wrote: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Anybody glib and shameless enough can sell Americans damn near anything. Very few faith-healers, astrologers, crackpot diet enthusiasts, peddlers of love potions, self-anointed prophets and messiahs—not to mention political mountebanks and conspiracy theorists — have ever lacked for a large and credulous audience.

I once had a neighbor with an artificially deep, booming voice I suspected he practiced in the shower. Although a businessman, his great passion was casting horoscopes. Upon hearing my wife complain about my disorderly home office, he chortled knowingly and said, “It’s a sure thing he’s not a Virgo.”

Of the 12 signs in the Zodiac, a Virgo happens to be exactly what I am. On the cusp of Libra no less, which supposedly indicates what adepts of the rival Freudian superstition would call an “anal-retentive” passion for order.

With odds of eleven to one in his favor, he’d flubbed the dub. If you think he was embarrassed, you’ve never met a serious astrologer. There’s always a deeper, more subtle way in which something laughably wrong is actually right.

I couldn’t help but think of my former neighbor when I heard Donald Trump explain that losing the popular presidential vote by almost three million votes constituted the greatest landslide win in history.

But I digress. To me, the two most astonishing events during my lifetime have been Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. The 1978 suicide/mass murder of 909 members of Jim Jones’ religious and political cult in the jungles of Guyana constituted the most appalling episode of group psychosis in U.S. history. Later came the 76 poor souls immolated in the Branch Davidian compound near Waco in 1993.

But for sheer nuttiness, the 1997 Heaven’s Gate episode struck me as equally bizarre—involving, as it did, not merely crackpot religion but UFOs. Thirty-nine cult members died together in the rapt expectation that a spaceship hidden behind an approaching comet would soon transport them to planet Nutball and eternal glory.

But seriously, is that any crazier than the invasion of a Washington pizza joint by an armed zealot from North Carolina last week? Thankfully, nobody died. But the ingredients for tragedy were all there: a preposterous conspiracy theory peddled by a talk show guru (and endorsed by White House appointee Gen. Michael Flynn) that supposedly involved Satanism, child sex slaves, and infanticide, and even the imagined participation of head witch Hillary Clinton and President Obama.

How crazy do you have to be to believe such rubbish?

This crazy: “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Infowars talk show host Alex Jones said in a YouTube video posted on November 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”

Jones, whose website currently champions his new best friend Donald Trump and the president-elect’s boon companion Vladimir Putin, later alibied that he’d spoken metaphorically about Syria. But I don’t think that’s what “personally” means.

Jones’s Inforwars.com site also markets bottled potions promising “Super Male Vitality,” and “Brain Force Plus,” along with survivalist gear and The Unholy See, a book concerning the Vatican and “forthcoming events of the prophetic future.”

In short, one-stop shopping for every impotent Froot Loop on your Christmas list.
Just last summer, Jones provoked a panic in rural Texas with fevered allegations that the real purpose of U.S. Army maneuvers there was to install secret armies of ISIS fighters in underground tunnels connecting empty Walmart stores.

He’s also persuaded thousands that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Connecticut was a “false flag” hoax aimed at confiscating their guns. Anybody believing that shouldn’t be allowed to walk off-leash in a city park, much less to buy an AR-15.

So, Alex Jones: absolutely psycho, or psycho like a fox?

We report, you decide.

However, I’d argue that “fake news” is a wholly inadequate term. Fake news is what Fox News and the New York Times too often do. The Comet Ping Pong pizza episode is more on the order of an organized psychiatric delusion—a collective mental illness. Alas, the Internet has driven a scary number of our fellow citizens back to medieval levels of superstition and credulousness.

But they can’t be reasoned out of it, only lampooned.