Connecticut Elementary School Massacre

[barracuda]

would you like some cake with that sir?

Yes. Yes I would, thank you. I happen to enjoy cake very much, and I don't have to appeal to any authority for that certitude, I can make my own mind up on that one. Dutch chocolate, if it's no trouble.

[beeline]

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/your_comprehensive_answer_to_every_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory/

Your comprehensive answer to every Sandy Hook conspiracy theory


While it’s often best not to engage with conspiracy theorists on their own turf, as you can probably never convince them, it’s worth setting the record straight on all the myths and phony evidence surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.

We’ve rounded up every major piece of evidence we could find that leads theorists to say the “official narrative” of events “doesn’t add up” and provided the facts that show why these questions can be easily explained. We’ve ignored the empty accusations with no evidence to support them (it was the Jews!) and focused only on the theories that try to present actual empirical or circumstantial evidence.

Let us know if we missed any and we’ll add to it as more myths emerge. In no particular order, here is your comprehensive guide to disproving the Sandy Hook Truthers:

Why aren’t the adults sadder? “They aren’t behaving the way human beings would act,” as conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner told fellow conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense on his radio show. Theorists have zeroed in on Robbie Parker, who they say wasn’t grieving hard enough for his slain 6-year-old daughter, Emilie. In one widely circulated clip, Parker laughs before stepping up to the microphone, and apparently someone says “read from the card” (as in cue card) before Parker breathes heavily in anticipation of beginning a press conference. “This is what actors do to get into character,” one popular YouTube video states. Rense and Weidner also take issue with the mourning of the school nurse, the family of slain teacher Victoria Soto, and others. “ALL ACTORS??? NO TEARS,” wonders the author of SandyHookHoax.com on a page featuring videos with numerous interviews from the shooting.

Answer: People mourn in many different ways, sometimes all at once. As a recent Scientific American article on gref noted, “oscillation between sadness and mirth repeated itself in study after study … Time and again, a grief-stricken person’s expression would change from dejection to laughter and back.” George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies grief, even developed a way to determine if this mourner’s laughter was genuine or merely a facade to hide grief — he determined that they “exhibited the real thing.” Scientists think this is part of our internal resilience mechanisms kicking in, because constant grief is simply too much for a person to handle.

What about Emilie? One of the most common myths circulated on message boards and in YouTube videos is that Emilie Parker is actually alive. The “proof” is a photo purportedly showing her with President Obama when he visited the school after the shooting. Conspiracists know it’s Emilie because she’s wearing the same dress as the one Emilie wore in a family portrait taken before the shooting (an alternative theory is that the girl in the photo with Obama is her “double”). Other websites take issue with the family portrait, alleging it was Photoshopped for some reason, pointing to the fact that the Emilie is making a “devil’s horns” sign with her hands and “making the devil’s horn hand sign isn’t easy. Try it yourself. Imagine getting a 3- and 4-year-old do it.”

Answer: The girl on Obama’s lap is Emilie’s little sister. It’s amazing that we have to say this, but sometimes younger siblings wear clothes passed down to them from older siblings, and sometimes siblings look alike because they are siblings. And there’s no evidence or even motive given for why the portrait would be Photoshopped. Making a “devil’s horn” gesture is actually incredibly easy. Try it yourself.

Why do they all look the same? Numerous websites juxtapose pictures of people from Newtown against pictures of similar looking people from Aurora, Colo., and assert they are the same actors.

Answer: Not all women with brown hair are the same person.

But what about the rifle? Alleged shooter Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle as his primary weapon, but conspiracist have seized on footage of police removing a long gun from the trunk of Lanza’s car. “This reveals the ‘Big Lie’ of the mainstream media … the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle was left in Lanza’s car,” conspiracy website NaturalNews states in a story picked up by Alex Jones’ InfoWars this week.

Answer: Actually, the gun shown being removed from Lanza’s car was a shotgun he never used. Lanza brought three guns inside the school — the AR-15 and two handguns — all of which were found inside the school.

How come the memorial pages were created before the shooting? One of the most cited pieces of “hard evidence” in the hoax theory is that memorial pages for the victims were allegedly created before the shooting even took place. Theorists point to Google results giving dates before the shooting for various pages.

Answer: Actually, this is a very common glitch for constricted-date Google searches. The results are imprecise and can often display incorrect dates on the search page, even when the date on the actual page is correct when you click through to it. For instance, here’s a Fox News story on the Sandy Hook shooting that Google says is from Oct. 1, 1983 — how come Fox News didn’t stop the shooting if it had 30 years advance notice???

What about the car? Early on, theorists latched on to the notion that the black Honda Accord driven by Lanza was not actually owned by his mother, as police say, but by a man named Chris Rodia, who was mentioned on a police scanner at the time of the shooting. One theory is that Rodia may have been an additional shooter. An even more advanced theory is that Rodia may have been taking advantage of mentally ill people like Lanza and using drugs to make them do his bidding.

Answer: This one was debunked by the theorists themselves just a few days after the shooting. BeforeItsNews, a conspiracy website, obtained the police audio definitively debunking the myth (Rodia appeared on the scanner because he was getting pulled over in a traffic stop miles away, but his license plate doesn’t match Lanza’s car). “This was a huge blow, because lots of people were making big leaps on this … but we now have to look elsewhere,” another amateur investigator said on YouTube.

What about the man in the woods? Central to proving any conspiracy theory is finding co-conspirators, which in this case means multiple shooters. Theorists have seized on helicopter footage of a man getting chased by police through the woods behind the school as evidence there was more than one shooter. Who is this man?

Answer: It was Chris Manfredonia, the father of a 6-year-old who attends the school. He was on his way to the school to make gingerbread houses with first-graders when he heard gunfire and smelled sulfur, so he ran.

But there was another man in the woods (maybe): Eyewitnesses saw a second man in the woods wearing camouflage pants and a dark jacket, and said that he may have been armed. Must be a second shooter.

Answer: Actually, he was, according to the Newtown Bee, “an off-duty tactical squad police officer from another town” who heard the gunfire.

What about the third man at the firehouse? Children fleeing the school said they saw a man pinned down on the ground in handcuffs outside the firehouse. Could this be a second or third shooter?

Answer: No, like Manfredonia, this man was briefly detained by police in the hectic aftermath, but quickly released when it was determined he was just a passerby, Connecticut State Police spokesperson Lt. Paul Vance, who was on the scene, confirmed to Salon. “Were there other people detained? The answer is yes. In the height of battle, until you’ve determined who, what, when, where and why of everyone in existence … that’s not unusual,” Vance said.

Then why did some eyewitnesses report multiple shooters? Theorizers have parsed conflicting media reports and interviews with eyewitnesses saying they saw multiple shooters. How could they be wrong?

Answer: In the stress and confusion of a situation like a mass shooting, misreporting is not just common, but the rule. And there’s a reason eyewitnesses are viewed so skeptically in criminal court cases: They often get things wrong. The Supreme Court has called eyewitness testimony “notoriously unreliable” while the Innocence Project says ”eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions.” Yet theorists would have you believe that a small handful of media interviews with people on the scene trumps all the other interviews with people there and police and media reports.

What about that Gene Rosen guy? Theorists have fixated on Rosen’s account of that day and harassed him for it. Rosen sheltered six children during the shooting, but theorists have alternately claimed that Rosen’s accounts are suspiciously too consistent in various interviews he gave, or suspiciously inconsistent. Other people claim Rosen was an actor, because they claim he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. And what happened to the bus driver? Why did Rosen sit with the kids for hours? Why didn’t he take them to the firehouse down the street where authorities were staging?

Answer: Rosen did invite the bus driver inside and she helped him contact their parents. An early AP report erroneously reported that he sat with the kids for hours, but he told us that the children were only inside his house for about 35 minutes. He did call their parents. Four parents came right away and Rosen took the remaining two to the fire station. Rosen is not a member of SAG (that’s a different Gene Rosen, who is seven years younger).

But how was the dead principal quoted? Theorists seized on a quote on the shooting in the Newtown Bee from a Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, who died in the shooting. How could she have been quoted if she “died”?

Answer: The Bee quickly posted a retraction and an apology: “An early online report from the scene at the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. The woman was not the school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack.” Things are confusing in the aftermath.

What about the LIBOR connection? Early theories posited that the fathers of both Lanza and alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes were set to testify before the Senate on the (real) LIBOR banking scandal. Could bankers have been involved in the shooting to discredit the supposedly explosive testimony set to be given by these two men?

Answer: This one falls apart in just about every way and the hardcore theorists abandoned it weeks ago as a bogus. Ben Swann, the Ohio TV reporter who thinks there were probably multiple shooters at Sandy Hook, investigated and determined there was “no evidence” to support any of the assumptions in the LIBOR theory. TPM also looked into it and found it to be “100% false.” There are no LIBOR hearings scheduled, neither man was selected as a witness, and neither man is in much of a position to deliver an explosive testimony on the scandal anyway.

Vance said he was disgusted by the conspiracy theories. ”There’s no hoax. I was there. I stepped over the dead children. That’s no hoax. And it’s offensive to me as an investigator, and it’s offensive to the families who lost their babies to have people come up with silliness like this. Whatever their reasoning is, whatever their rationale is, it’s just terribly offensive,” Vance added.


Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

[MacCruiskeen]

the eye-witness testimony of police officers and medical examiners and family members

Please post or link to any such actual testimony you may be able to locate. I have seen none.

NB (Again, this is the third time I've had to make this clear to you): I mean, specifically, eye-witness testimony that Adam Lanza was the shooter. Not just testimony that somone was found dead in the school who was neither a teacher nor a child. This goes without saying, or it should.

My personal list of Shit I Want Cleared Up With Regards To This Case:

1. The reported altercation at the school between Lanza and staff.

There was no such altercation. See Niall Bradley's blogpost, which I'm now linking to for the fourth (!) time:

Adam Lanza in Altercation at SH School on December 13th?

Initial media reports stated that Adam Lanza had been at the school the day before the shooting and was involved in an “altercation” with staff – three of whom were killed the next day.

That claim has since been retracted, with the CT state police stating that they did not know of any reports about any altercations at the school, but there has been no mention of who initially made the claim to the media and on what basis. If the police have this information they have a duty to make it publicly available.

http://www.niallbradley.net/2013/01/07/ ... questions/

Request: I would ask anyone responding to me from now on to actually read ^^that fairly detailed but admirably succinct blogpost, so that I don't have to keep on repeating myself ad infinitum, or repeating him, while wandering in the sixth circle of hell.

- have to log off in a rush right now.

[barracuda]

NB (Again, this is the third time I've had to make this clear to you): I mean, specifically, eye-witness testimony that Adam Lanza was the shooter. Not just testimony that somone was found dead in the school who was neither a teacher nor a child. This goes without saying, or it should.

You're request is stupid. Make it as many times as you need to for sake of your personal comfort or sanctity of worldview, but bear in mind that there may not be eye witnesses who can identify a masked man they never met as Adam Lanza. The eyewitness testimony of police officers (find your own links, you're not looking very hard) who found his body dead at the scene may be as close as you will get, and believe it or not, would almost certainly carry the day in a court of law. If that's not good enough for you, take satisfaction from the fact that apparently you require a higher standard of evidence than the rest of the world, and are probably a morally superior individual floating somewhere in the clouds above earth. Enjoy your flight. Please keep your arms and legs inside the ride vehicle at all times.

- Police found a body at the scene.
- Searched it and discovered Ryan Lanza's ID.
- Went to Ryan's home and found him there, alive.
- Peter Lanza identified the body as that of Adam Lanza.
- Adam Lanza was found dead at the scene, Q.E.D.

There was no such altercation. See Niall Bradley's blogpost, which I'm now linking to for the fourth (!) time:

Post your link as many times as makes you happy. I read his entire take on it the very first time you posted it, twice, and it didn't shine any light, at all, on why the altercation was originally reported. Or much else, frankly. And most of his issues with the story have been explored on this thread in great detail already.

[Project Willow]

Willow, what's going on here? If we weren't talking about a mass murder of children, I would presume you were joking.

Why, because I disagree with you? I didn't notice that your text was a link, although I had already skimmed that article, honestly, it's nothing more than that I need new glasses.

You are begging the question. You are also appealing to authority. That's already two basic logical fallacies in one line alone. Adam Lanza's guilt is - as you well know - the very point at issue.

I don't agree that it is the very point at issue, at this time, and I've been over why before. These were not political targets, there's no immediate, demonstrable pay off in creating an event like this. I don't see any reason to assume that all of the minute, unresolved details in the case cast enough doubt on the authorities designating Lanza, or point to it being a conspiracy, as the fog of trauma and poor reporting may account for them just as well.

I'm simply offering information about why mass killings occur so that also can be part of the conversation. Is it really impossible to imagine that some mass killings aren't part of a grand scheme?

[MacCruiskeen]

You're request is stupid.

You're orthography is fawlty. You're response is helpless. But telling.

There was no such altercation. See Niall Bradley's blogpost, which I'm now linking to for the fourth (!) time:

Post your link as many times as makes you happy. I read his entire take on it the very first time you posted it, twice, and it didn't shine any light, at all, on why the altercation was originally reported.

You cannot read. Not even your own posts. You never asked why the altercation was originally reported:

My personal list of Shit I Want Cleared Up With Regards To This Case:

1. The reported altercation at the school between Lanza and staff.

I cleared it up for you instantly, with a link: It didn't in fact happen. Now you're pissed off about that, because it reveals your reading comprehension to be sup-optimal. And as Niall Bradley himself makes a point of pointing out in bold type, he too would like to know why we were told it did happen, and by whom:

there has been no mention of who initially made the claim to the media and on what basis. If the police have this information they have a duty to make it publicly available.

So you are not too embarrassed to dismiss someone who makes your point before you make it, and better (and to dismiss it with gratuitous and unprovoked rudeness at that, to both me and him), precisely because he makes your point before you make it, and better. Impressive stuff, barracuda.

You're request is stupid.

Sire, if it's a battle of wits you want, I refuse to fight with an unarmed opponent. Besides, you are quite clearly no gentleman.

[barracuda]

I want to know why the altercation was reported. Clear enough for you? If not, I suggest Google Translate.

But thanks for further useless fluff, this thread doesn't have enough of that.

[geogeo]

BRAVO -- 40-some pages in, and it's still smart people attacking each other and calling each other names. Thank goodness there is no 'They' out there who are chuckling at the disarray the tinfoil-hatters find themselves in.

Repeat after me:

--The version of the Newtown shooting as given to us by our Authorities is the correct one.
--Where there appear to be holes, there are no holes. These are simply the typical problems with eyewitness statements; eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and you should never believe them unless they agree with what Authorities tell you. They're called "authorities" because, while flawed, they are professionals, they are right, and you should trust.
--Your authorities always know better than you because they have the real evidence in their hands, whereas you have only wild speculation.
--You weren't there; you can't know anything.
--You are disrespecting the children and their memories.
--For more on the unreliability of eyewitnesses, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_800#Alternative_theories. "The NTSB's review of the released witness documents determined that they contained 736 witness accounts, of which 258 were characterized as "streak of light" witnesses". All of these witnesses were wrong, and the NTSB cleared up all these people's wrong ideas. All of these people now agree that they were wrong.
--Mass shootings in the United States are perpetrated by Lone Gunmen acting alone, usually social outcasts; all terrorist attacks are crazed jihadists islams.

[barracuda]

More mattress stuffing. You're as bad as the rest of us.

[8bitagent]

BRAVO -- 40-some pages in, and it's still smart people attacking each other and calling each other names. Thank goodness there is no 'They' out there who are chuckling at the disarray the tinfoil-hatters find themselves in.

Repeat after me:

--The version of the Newtown shooting as given to us by our Authorities is the correct one.
--Where there appear to be holes, there are no holes. These are simply the typical problems with eyewitness statements; eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and you should never believe them unless they agree with what Authorities tell you. They're called "authorities" because, while flawed, they are professionals, they are right, and you should trust.
--Your authorities always know better than you because they have the real evidence in their hands, whereas you have only wild speculation.
--You weren't there; you can't know anything.
--You are disrespecting the children and their memories.
--For more on the unreliability of eyewitnesses, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_800#Alternative_theories. "The NTSB's review of the released witness documents determined that they contained 736 witness accounts, of which 258 were characterized as "streak of light" witnesses". All of these witnesses were wrong, and the NTSB cleared up all these people's wrong ideas. All of these people now agree that they were wrong.
--Mass shootings in the United States are perpetrated by Lone Gunmen acting alone, usually social outcasts; all terrorist attacks are crazed jihadists islams.

I'm already coming up with bullet point "just asking questions" for the next horrifying mass event we spend 45 exhaustive pages on...I kid of course. But it's interesting how these threads always start with
one to two sentence periods of shock, followed quickly by early mis/reportings, eerie parallels to other deep state events, information on the accused that ties to other syncs and coincidences, and finally descending into
all out flame wars and people threatening to leave

[BrandonD]

BRAVO -- 40-some pages in, and it's still smart people attacking each other and calling each other names. Thank goodness there is no 'They' out there who are chuckling at the disarray the tinfoil-hatters find themselves in.

Repeat after me:

--The version of the Newtown shooting as given to us by our Authorities is the correct one.
--Where there appear to be holes, there are no holes. These are simply the typical problems with eyewitness statements; eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and you should never believe them unless they agree with what Authorities tell you. They're called "authorities" because, while flawed, they are professionals, they are right, and you should trust.
--Your authorities always know better than you because they have the real evidence in their hands, whereas you have only wild speculation.
--You weren't there; you can't know anything.
--You are disrespecting the children and their memories.
--For more on the unreliability of eyewitnesses, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_800#Alternative_theories. "The NTSB's review of the released witness documents determined that they contained 736 witness accounts, of which 258 were characterized as "streak of light" witnesses". All of these witnesses were wrong, and the NTSB cleared up all these people's wrong ideas. All of these people now agree that they were wrong.
--Mass shootings in the United States are perpetrated by Lone Gunmen acting alone, usually social outcasts; all terrorist attacks are crazed jihadists islams.

That is exactly what I was thinking after reading some of this.

I think the following simple facts can be acknowledged by most thinking people:

- Conspiracies happen, and authorities sometimes lie.
- Reality is not fully understood.

These 2 very simple facts mean that there is a whole world of speculation that is entirely within reason.

So when someone speculates on a supposed conspiracy, I don't ever see a reason to call them stupid.

It appears that one of the main things that enrages people is that they believe those people who are proposing what they consider to be outlandish non-conventional ideas are keeping society from accepting what they consider to be reasonable non-conventional ideas.

This is not necessarily true, because people do not even agree upon which *conventional* ideas are outlandish and which are reasonable. Take the whole gun control issue, for example.

And the people on a forum like this, we generally have unconventional ideas, so we've surely all known what it feels like to be told that we are an idiot for even daring to consider an idea as possible. Knowing this experience, I really wonder how any of us can sit in their current spot on the "reality spectrum" and make bold proclamations.

Anyway, this is just an idealistic post saying that I do still think it is possible for people of widely varying beliefs to speculate on crazy ideas in a civilized manner. Sometimes we just need to snap back to the realization that there are human beings on the other side of the screen, and they are possibly similar to us in many ways.

[barracuda]

...when someone speculates on a supposed conspiracy, I don't ever see a reason to call them stupid.

It appears that one of the main things that enrages people is that they believe those people who are proposing what they consider to be outlandish non-conventional ideas are keeping society from accepting what they consider to be reasonable non-conventional ideas.

Okay, first of all, I am not the enraged one with regards to the interpretation of this event. For pointing out inconsistencies and irrelevancies surrounding the conspiracy talking points here, I have been called for my trouble a wide and colorful assortment of names, including but not limited to psychopath, asshole, jack-off and thought police. I am not and have not been enraged by any of these discussions. Disappointed, perhaps, but not angry. The anger is coming from the other side of the argument.

Perhaps I oughtn't've addressed Mac's request as stupid, per se. It would be more accurate to simply have noted its superfluousness to understanding and moved on. But how does one advance the discussion when the very identity of the body found and identified as Adam Lanza cannot be accepted as a basis for the discussion? Think about the scope and category of conspiracy you're outlining if you think the body at the school wasn't Adam Lanza. I mean, you might, like lupercal for instance, feel certain that Adam was killed by a covert op at his home and bodily transported to the school to be planted as a set up, but even there you're at least conceding that Adam Lanza was actually identified as the body at the school. According to all accounts, his father claimed his body, right? Where do you go with this thing if you can't settle that question? How do you begin to try and make sense of even the inconsistencies here if your standing point after five weeks and fifty pages of discussion is to simply contend that perhaps he doesn't exist at all? Does that perspective allow any certainty that the event happened? At all? Because if not, then what we're discussing is epistemology, or maybe even ontology, and ought, in my opinion, be addressed as such, in which case a fruitful discussion may ensue along philosophical lines.

I think the following simple facts can be acknowledged by most thinking people:

- Conspiracies happen, and authorities sometimes lie.
- Reality is not fully understood.

These 2 very simple facts mean that there is a whole world of speculation that is entirely within reason.

My feeling is that there is a third a priori acknowledgement we should be able to agree on: that while history is a constructed narrative, there are such things as verifiable facts. The pure historicity of those facts may be nigh impossible for us here to prove beyond all shadow of conjecture, but that shouldn't stop us from assessing them logically, making determinations as to veracity, and then using the variable hardness of those facts to gain degrees of footing.

The claim has basically been put forward that if you might accept the existence of Adam Lanza at the school, you're obviously cowed by the awesome Daddy-imperatives of the authoritarian dictate. This is simply wrong. That unanswerable claim is a pejorative attack which contains no moral or intellectual standing that I can discern, and seems censorious to the point of suppressiveness. You might just as well say all conspiracy theorists are kooks. Fortunately, I have become inured to both accusations by practice. There are weirder and deeper questions about this event than whether or not Adam Lanza killed anyone, in my opinion.

Yes, the context of this forum necessitates the widest possible leeway revolving around interpretation. No one can say that hasn't happened, or that it has been kneecapped in some fashion by attempts to interpose what facts and logic we can into the mix. It is not required that you surrender any and all earthbound notions at the login here, even if all we really know about the event is that a news story appeared on our LCDs. Because realistically, that is all we know. Nothing else about the event is provable without personal presence at the scene. And while that idea requires that any and all discussion in of necessity speculative, on those grounds the acceptance of the reality of Adam Lanza, or Robbie Parker, or the deaths in Newtown is no more or less an authoritarian position than the obverse.

I believe in this case that those people who are proposing what I consider to be outlandish non-conventional ideas in the form of disavowing the reality of the existence of the shooter, or the authenticity of the parents, or the reality of the victims, are actually performing a moral wrong. In which case, it is my responsibility as a member of the forum and a human being to make that known.

[justdrew]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/20/teen-arrested-in-new-mexico-after-shooting-two-adults-and-three-children/

looks like we caught this one.

A young man has been arrested and charged in the murder of five people, including three children, in the southwestern US state of New Mexico, police said Sunday.

Police said in a statement they found the bodies of an adult male and female and two girls and a boy described as “juveniles,” all dead from multiple gunshot wounds, when they arrived at an Albuquerque home late Saturday.

Aaron Williamson, a spokesman for the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, told AFP “multiple” weapons were found at the scene, including a “military-type assault rifle,” adding that the investigation was still under way.

The police statement said a “male juvenile” is in custody, charged with two counts of murder and three counts of “child abuse resulting in death.”

The identities of the suspect and the victims have not been made public. Local media reported that the suspect was 15 years old.

The shooting came days after US President Barack Obama unveiled a series of sweeping measures aimed at addressing gun violence in the wake of last month’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

The proposed measures include a ban on some military-style assault rifles and closing loopholes that allow many gun buyers to avoid background checks.

The killing of 26 people at the Connecticut school, including 20 young children, has galvanized gun control advocates, but congressional opposition remains high to new restrictions on the constitutional right to bear arms.

[MacCruiskeen]

My feeling is that there is a third a priori acknowledgement we should be able to agree on: that while history is a constructed narrative, there are such things as verifiable facts.

Yes indeed. For instance, we have verified the decidedly non-trivial fact that not one single actual eyewitness actually saw Adam Lanza actually do any of the things he is alleged to have done. This despite the further verifiable fact that you have repeatedly assiduously attempted to fudge that simple issue. (Certainly some of them saw at least one gunman. This is not at issue. Indeed, at least one of them claimed to have seen two shadows run past a window during or very shortly after the shooting. And certainly Adam Lanza's body was found in the school.)

Then there is the verifiable fact that the corporate media have served up an incredible number of untruths about the case, nearly all of them attributed to unnamed "law-enforcement officials". They have served up those untruths with complete impunity. (Why?)

Among these untruths are the claims that Nancy Lanza worked at the school, and that Adam Lanza had recently had an "altercation" with four staff members at that same school -- both whoppers, porkies, lies. (By whom?) In addition, it has been insinuated -- or in fact reported in so many words -- that he was a monster, that he was an outcast, that she was a harpie, that she wanted to get rid of him, that she (alternatively) over-protected him, that she wanted to move, that he hated her, that he worshipped the Devil, that he was completely insensitive to pain. All this (and much more) in a morally repulsive and deepy shabby attempt to cook up -- to concoct, to fabricate, to invent -- a remotely plausible motive for the crime and a suitably scary* "psychological profile" for the alleged killer.

So: as things stand at present, Adam Lanza had no motive. You, as the Voice of Reason and Morality, are not bothered by that in the least. It doesn't deter you in the slightest from presuming him guilty as charged (or rather, as not charged, because corpses can't be charged, much less interrogated or brought to trial, whether there's one of them or,say, nineteen).

Did Adam Lanza have the means and/or the opportunity? Certainly, he had both - as did you yourself, along with literally hundreds of millions of other people in the US and indeed elsewhere, i.e. as did anyone with access to at least one gun, plus a way of getting to Newtown Elementary School. So that doesn't help us much further.

Did he have a criminal record of any kind? No. This too is a verifiable fact.

Did he have any history of even slightly violent conduct? None whatsoever that we know of.

Has he, nonetheless, been chewed up and spat out without a qualm by opportunistic hacks and smartass crackerbarrel psychologists, on this board and elsewhere? Oh yes. By christ, yes. Quite shamelessly.

Fine things, verifiable facts.

*
THE BLURRED, BLACK-AND-WHITE FACE OF PURE, UTTER EVIL

^^This particular exemplar of that wonderfully handy image is taken from the respected, liberal, quality broadsheet, The Guardian.

Here are some facts worth verifying, and easily verifiable in any truly free country with a truly free press:

1. Who first supplied that image to the media? Name?

2. For what organisation does that person work?

3. To which media outlet[s] did he or she first supply it, and how?

4. When, exactly? (On what day, at what exact time?)

5. How, where and when was that photo originally acquired by the person[s] and/or organisation who then supplied it to the media?

In addition:

6. What other images of Adam Lanza, if any, are currently in the possession of that person and / or organisation? If other recent images are in fact available, why have they not also been supplied to the media?

7. Which person-in-authority ultimately authorised the acquisition, selection, and release of that photo?











-

[barracuda]

And certainly Adam Lanza's body was found in the school.

Well at least we've gotten that out of the way, because when you said...

Not just testimony that somone was found dead in the school who was neither a teacher nor a child.

...it began to seem as if even that was shaky.

Yes indeed. For instance, we have verified the decidedly non-trivial fact that not one single actual eyewitness actually saw Adam Lanza actually do any of the things he is alleged to have done.

That's not true. We have decidedly not verified that fact. Just the opposite in fact. In the course of this discussion we've determined that a number of individuals saw the shooter and lived to tell about it. The question is whether or not the person they saw was Adam Lanza. If it was, then we have eyewitnesses. We are simply not yet privy to their testimony. So I think you're jumping the gun on that one.

Among these untruths are the claims that Nancy Lanza worked at the school, and that Adam Lanza had recently had an "altercation" with four staff members at that same school -- both whoppers, porkies, lies. (By whom?) In addition, it has been insinuated -- or in fact reported in so many words -- that he was a monster, that he was an outcast, that she was a harpie, that she wanted to get rid of him, that she (alternatively) over-protected him, that she wanted to move, that he hated her, that he worshipped the Devil, that he was completely insensitive to pain.

We don't know the reality of any of these statements definitively. Our sources that tell us, for instance, that Adam Lanza did not have an altercation at the school are the exact same sources that said he did. Why do we trust them the second time around? Because it suits our perspective on the event? How do you know he didn't worship Satan?

So: as things stand at present, Adam Lanza had no motive.

There doesn't need to be a reasonable motive for acts of insanity. And no matter who killed those people, it was such an act.

Did Adam Lanza have the means and/or the opportunity? Certainly, he had both - as did you yourself,

I have an alibi. He does not.