Connecticut Elementary School Massacre

[stefano]

Christ

C2W? wrote...
Do you have a list of mass shooters who took meds? All I can find are dozens of articles all over the internet saying that it was "almost all" or "99 percent" of them. But no names.

This is via WRH, so use your salt.

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Colombine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Jarred Viktor, age 15, stabbed his grandmother 61 times after 5 days on Paxil.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded.

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a.22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania.

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California.


Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head.

Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet.

Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”).

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002, (Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”.

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

[seemslikeadream]

Sandy Hook Massacre: Gun Makers Lose Major Ruling Over Liability

March 14, 2019
BREAKING

Attorney Josh Koskoff speaks at a news conference with family of victims and attorneys on the steps of the Connecticut state Supreme Court on Nov. 14, 2017.Jessica Hill for The New York Times


Attorney Josh Koskoff speaks at a news conference with family of victims and attorneys on the steps of the Connecticut state Supreme Court on Nov. 14, 2017.Jessica Hill for The New York Times
[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

The Connecticut Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the firearms industry on Thursday, clearing the way for a lawsuit to move forward against the companies that manufactured and sold the semiautomatic rifle used by the gunman in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The ruling allows the lawsuit brought by victims’ relatives to go to trial, which could force gun companies to turn over internal communications that they have fiercely fought to keep private and provide a revealing — and possibly damaging — glimpse into how the industry operates.

The court agreed with the lower court judge’s decision to dismiss claims that directly challenged the federal law shielding the gun companies from litigation, but found the case can move forward based on a state law regarding unfair trade practices.

Justices wrote in the majority opinion that “it falls to a jury to decide whether the promotional schemes alleged in the present case rise to the level of illegal trade practices and whether fault for the tragedy can be laid at their feet.”

The decision represents a significant development in the long-running battle between gun control advocates and the gun lobby.

The ruling validates the novel strategy lawyers for the victims’ families used as they sought to find a route around the vast protections in federal law that guard gun companies from litigation when their products are used to commit a crime.

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The victims’ relatives had faced long odds as they argued that the gun companies bore some responsibility for the horrific attack.

The lawsuit argued that the AR-15-style Bushmaster used in the 2012 attack had been marketed as a weapon of war, invoking the violence of combat and using slogans like “Consider your man card reissued.”

Such messages reflected, according to the lawsuit, a deliberate effort to appeal to troubled young men like Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who charged into the elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 first graders, in a spray of gunfire. The attack traumatized the nation and made Newtown, Conn., the small town where it happened, a rallying point in the broader debate over gun violence.

The high stakes posed by the case stirred a vigorous response from both sides that only intensified after recurring episodes of deadly mass violence that followed the Newtown attack.

Among those who lobbied in support of the lawsuit were gun violence prevention groups, emergency doctors who treated patients wounded by assault rifle fire and a statewide association of school superintendents.

Many gun-rights groups also raised their concerns, including the National Rifle Association, which contended in its brief that allowing the case to move ahead stood to “eviscerate” the gun companies’ legal protections.

A Ridgefield High School student holds up a sign with the names of those killed in Parkland and Sandy Hook during a walkout on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, Friday, April 20, 2018 in Ridgefield, Conn.Jessica Hill for The New York Times


A Ridgefield High School student holds up a sign with the names of those killed in Parkland and Sandy Hook during a walkout on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, Friday, April 20, 2018 in Ridgefield, Conn.Jessica Hill for The New York Times
The ruling comes as yet another twist in the lawsuit’s circuitous path through the court system, one that continued far longer than many, including legal experts and the families, had initially expected.

The ruling had been delayed after Remington, the manufacturer and one of the nation’s oldest gun makers, filed for bankruptcy last year as its sales declined and debts mounted.

The lawsuit, brought by family members of nine people who were killed and a teacher who was shot and survived, was originally filed in 2014, then moved to federal court, where a judge ordered that it be returned to the state level.

The families were given a glimmer of hope when a State Superior Court judge, Barbara N. Bellis, permitted the case to approach a trial before she ultimately dismissed it. She found that the claims fell “squarely within the broad immunity” provided by federal law.

In 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which restricts lawsuits against gun sellers and makers by granting industrywide immunity from blame when one of their products is used in a crime. Lawmakers behind the measure cited a need to foil what they described as predatory and politically driven litigation.

The law does allow exceptions for sale and marketing practices that violate state or federal laws and instances of so-called negligent entrustment, in which a gun is carelessly given or sold to a person posing a high risk of misusing it.

In the lawsuit, the families pushed to broaden the scope to include the manufacturer, Remington, which was named along with a wholesaler and a local retailer in the suit.

The lawsuit said that the companies were wrong to entrust an untrained civilian public with a weapon designed for maximizing fatalities on the battlefield.

Lawyers pointed out advertising — with messages of combat dominance and hyper-masculinity — that resonated with disturbed young men who could be induced to use the weapon to commit violence.

“Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” Joshua D. Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the families, told the panel of judges during oral arguments in the case in 2017. The weapon used by Mr. Lanza had been legally purchased by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also killed.

Lawyers representing the gun companies argued that the claims raised in the lawsuit were specifically the kind that law inoculated them against. They said that agreeing with the families’ arguments would require amending the law or ignoring how it had been applied in the past.

James B. Vogts, a lawyer for Remington, said during oral arguments that the shooting “was a tragedy that cannot be forgotten.”

“But no matter how tragic,” he added, “no matter how much we wish those children and their teachers were not lost and those damages not suffered, the law needs to be applied dispassionately.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/nyre ... court.html

[seemslikeadream]

Exclusive: NRA Official Sought Sandy Hook Hoaxer To Question Parkland Shooting, Emails Show
NRA official Mark Richardson emailed a day after the Parkland shooting to say the shooter “was not alone.”


HuffPost obtained an email correspondence between an NRA official and a Sandy Hook hoaxer who has contributed to the pain and suffering of parents who lost children in the 2012 shooting.
An official with the National Rifle Association corresponded with a prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist to call into question the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, emails obtained by HuffPost show.

NRA officer Mark Richardson emailed Wolfgang Halbig, a noted harasser of parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School victims, to float a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed last year.

“Just like [Sandy Hook], there is so much more to this story,” Richardson said in an email dated Feb. 15, 2018 ― just one day after the Florida shooting. Twenty children and six adults were killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. “[The Parkland shooter] was not alone.” The email was sent from his official NRA email address.

Richardson is a training instructor and program coordinator with the NRA. He has worked there since 2006, according to a social media post. In an emailed statement to HuffPost, he confirmed he had been in contact with Halbig and said he was asking a “legitimate question.”

“Since an individual who was prohibited from the school was aloud [sic] to pass through the front doors with a backpack containing a long gun, it is a legitimate question to ask if he had assistance concerning access to the school,” Richardson told HuffPost.

He added, “No one else seems to be interested enough to even ask the question?”

Mark Richardson, an NRA training instructor and program coordinator, emailed a harasser of Sandy Hook parents to float a cons
Facebook
Mark Richardson, an NRA training instructor and program coordinator, emailed a harasser of Sandy Hook parents to float a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
The email exchange between Richardson and Halbig emerged as part of a recent discovery process for an ongoing lawsuit between Infowars host Alex Jones and Sandy Hook parent Scarlett Lewis, who is suing Jones and his show for intentional infliction of emotional distress. For years, he has falsely called the victims of the tragedy “crisis actors,” emboldening dangerous conspiracy theorists to harass people who lost their children in the tragic shooting.

Jones is also being sued by nine other Sandy Hook parents in separate lawsuits.

In the email Richardson sent to Halbig, he raises a series of questions intended to poke holes in the official account of the Parkland shooting — a tactic common among conspiracy theorists. Richardson then quickly and falsely concludes there were others in on the shooting, writing, “He was not alone.” He has no direct knowledge of the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Wolfgang,

You have included me with a lot of Information since the Sandy Hook Incident and I do appreciate it very much. Concerning what happened in Florida yesterday, I have been asking the question and no one else seems to be asking it. How is it that Cruz was able gain access to a secured facility while in possession of a rifle, multiple magazines, smoke grenades and a gas mask? To pull the fire alarm, he had to already be inside. Correct? When my Children were in school the only way into the school was through the front door and past the main office. We have been told that he was. Prohibited from entering the building With a backpack. No longer a student, why was he allowed in the building at all? Where was all the equipment, in his back pocket? Just like SH, there is so much more to this story. He was not alone. Just a few questions that have surfaced in the past 24 hours. Thank you for all the information And for what you do. STAY SAFE

The same day Richardson wrote Halbig to assert falsely that there was a second shooter, Infowars published a story titled “Video: Second Shooter Reported In Florida Massacre.” Jones is facing a separate defamation lawsuit for falsely identifying someone as the Parkland shooter.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) condemned Jones’ fearmongering conspiracy theories Tuesday on MSNBC, along with the tech companies that allow those dangerous theories to proliferate.

“There is no constitutional duty on an internet company to allow somebody to terrorize parents of mass tragedies like Alex Jones did for so long,” Murphy said.


Alex Jones is being sued by nine Sandy Hook parents.
HuffPost Illustration

The uncovered email is even more troubling, given the recipient: Halbig, an Infowars contributor, is on the front lines of spreading false statements about the victims of Sandy Hook. He has spammed open records requests to Newtown officials for documents related to the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45-60 gallons of blood,” The New York Times reported.

His discussions on Infowars have included the sickening theory that 6-year-old Avielle Richman didn’t die in the Sandy Hook shooting. In a 2018 email to Richardson, Halbig mentions the girl’s name in capital letters in the subject line.

Her father, Jeremey Richman, died Monday by suspected suicide. And in the past two weeks, two Parkland shooting survivors also died by suspected suicide.

Halbig is not alone in encouraging the harassment of Sandy Hook families. A legion of trolls inspired by Infowars and other outlets have made tangible death threats against many Sandy Hook parents. Lucy Richards of Florida was sentenced to five months in prison in 2017 after she sent Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner a voicemail that warned, “You gonna die. Death is coming to you.” Pozner is suing Jones for defamation.

In his response to Richardson, Halbig gloats about how he can “no longer be called a FRAUD.”

Lewis is being represented in her lawsuit by the Texas law firm Farrar & Ball. Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of TruthOrFiction.com and a consultant for Lewis’ attorneys, found the email while combing through thousands of others released as part of the discovery process.

“I had just spent the past six hours reading thousands of deeply disturbing emails Mr. Halbig sent to government agencies, political groups, and media organizations soliciting support for his dangerous fixation on Sandy Hook,” Binkowski told HuffPost in a statement. “I was shocked when that support came from an NRA official in 2018.”

The revelation comes as the NRA finds itself floundering financially. In 2017 the organization reported a loss of $55 million in income as membership plummeted.

The NRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Halbig, meanwhile, had apparently been vying for the NRA’s attention for some time. After his correspondence with Richardson, Halbig emailed two friends to discuss the success of his efforts.

“After 4 years of emailing the NRA I finally got a response in light of the Broward County School Shooting,” he wrote. But ever the conspiracist, Halbig questioned Richardson’s motives.

“Now why?” he ended the email.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exclusiv ... 83bdbe59eb

[stickdog99]

So the NRA conspired with a Sandy Hook hoaxer to provoke internet questioning of a mass shooting?

Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

[seemslikeadream]

The father of a Sandy Hook victim dies from an apparent suicide
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/25/us/sandy ... index.html

Second Parkland student commits suicide
https://www.wral.com/second-parkland-st ... /18282347/

My son is a elementary school teacher and the drills are horrifying

'I Felt More Traumatized Than Trained': Active-Shooter Drills Take Toll on Teachers
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019 ... ooter.html

Indiana Teachers Were Shot With Pellets During Active-Shooter Drill, Union Says
March 22, 2019
Teachers at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Ind., were trained on how to respond to a gunman. During one recent drill, teachers were shot with pellets and left with welts and bruises, their union said.Meadowlawn Elementary School Facebook, via The Herald Journal


Teachers at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Ind., were trained on how to respond to a gunman. During one recent drill, teachers were shot with pellets and left with welts and bruises, their union said.Meadowlawn Elementary School Facebook, via The Herald Journal
How realistic should active-shooter trainings be?

Not as lifelike as a drill at an Indiana elementary school in January, according to teachers there, whose union says they were shot with plastic pellets that caused welts, cuts and bruises.

The teachers’ experience at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Ind., was detailed by a representative from their union in testimony before state legislators this week. The union was promoting a provision that would bar trainers from shooting school staff members or students with any kind of projectile during safety drills.

During the active-shooter drill, “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries to the extent that welts appeared, and blood was drawn,” the union, the Indiana State Teachers Association, wrote on Twitter during the hearing.

“The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened,” the union said. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.”

The teachers have not been publicly identified, and none have spoken on the record about their experience.

One teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said trainers fired pellet guns at the teachers during several training exercises, not just the execution-style shooting. But in other exercises “you were allowed to try to not get hit,” she said in a phone interview on Friday.

This is your last free article.

She said the teachers were not told they were going to be shot before the execution-style shooting exercise began, and the trainers did not ask the teachers about their medical histories before subjecting them to physical force.

“It hurt really bad,” said the woman, who said she was left with bruises, welts and bleeding cuts that took almost two weeks to heal. “You don’t know who you are shooting and what types of experience those individuals had in the past, whether they had PTSD or anything else. And we didn’t know what we were going into.”

She described the training as frightening, painful and insulting.

“What makes it more outrageous is they thought we would need to have that experience of being shot to take this seriously,” she said. “When I thought about it that way, I really started to get angry. Like we are not professionals. It felt belittling.”

Dan Holub, the executive director of the Indiana State Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, said that teachers recognized the need for safety training but that the risks of venturing so far into realism outweighed the benefits.

“We need to use common sense — and not use these extreme methods of training,” he said.

The provision that the union is pushing for is an amendment to a school safety bill that would require schools to conduct annual active-shooter drills. The bill would also provide schools with funding for school resource officers and mental health services. It has passed the House and is now in the Senate.

A member of the White County Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team played the role of a gunman during a training exercise at Frontier Junior-Senior High School in Chalmers, Ind., a short drive from Monticello.Michael Johnson/Monticello Herald Journal


A member of the White County Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team played the role of a gunman during a training exercise at Frontier Junior-Senior High School in Chalmers, Ind., a short drive from Monticello.Michael Johnson/Monticello Herald Journal
The author of the House bill, Representative Wendy McNamara, who is also a high school principal, said it was based on the recommendations of a task force authorized by the governor to examine school safety practices after the Parkland, Fla., shooting.

She said that she learned of the drill only after her bill passed, but that she would work with colleagues to try to add appropriate language to protect teachers during safety drills.

“You can only assume that people would want to be reasonable and put those protections in,” she said. “And if not, then I’ll find a way to make sure that happens.”

Mr. Holub, whose organization represents 40,000 educators from kindergarten to 12th grade across the state, said it was the first time he had heard of such injuries during a safety drill. He added that he believed the police officers carrying out the exercise had gone beyond the prescribed curriculum of the training.

The White County Sheriff’s Office, which conducted the drill, did not respond to a request for comment. The sheriff, Bill Brooks, told The Indianapolis Star that his officers would not use the pellets during teacher trainings anymore.

The Twin Lakes School Corporation, which oversees Meadowlawn and four other schools in or near Monticello, about 90 minutes north of Indianapolis, issued a statement on Thursday about the training.

The corporation said that it routinely teamed up with the sheriff’s office to run safety drills, including “ALICE training,” which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. After teachers voiced concern about the training, the corporation met with them and the sheriff’s office to discuss the matter, the statement said.

The ALICE trainings were developed by a private company after the Columbine shooting in 1999 and are now used in schools around the country.

ALICE trainings have been criticized at times for their approach, which encourages countering — if there is no way to escape — in order to distract and disrupt a gunman.

In a statement, the ALICE Training Institute said that its methods “empower individuals to participate in their own survival in the face of violence.”

The statement said that the institute has tens of thousands of certified instructors across the country, and said that local agencies were best positioned to adapt the trainings to an institution or community’s needs.

“ALICE training provides proactive response options to increase survivability,” the statement said.

While school security has become a huge growth industry, experts caution that there is a scarcity of research about which tactics are most appropriate. Debates have erupted over arming teachers, the usefulness of metal detectors and best practices during unthinkable scenarios.

“I’m not sure that one mock example of this would ever prepare anyone for what occurs during a true active-shooting situation,” Mr. Holub said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/i ... -shot.html

[stickdog99]

“ALICE training provides proactive response options to increase survivability,” the statement said.

While school security has become a huge growth industry, experts caution that there is a scarcity of research about which tactics are most appropriate. Debates have erupted over arming teachers, the usefulness of metal detectors and best practices during unthinkable scenarios.

“I’m not sure that one mock example of this would ever prepare anyone for what occurs during a true active-shooting situation,” Mr. Holub said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/i ... -shot.html

Here's a conspiracy theory for you. Who has better means, a more lucrative motive, or more matching profiles to carry out mass shootings than those employed by the "huge growth industry" that directly profits from such mass shootings? Just saying ...

[Grizzly]

nearest 24 hour gas station near me

find me the nearest gas station to my location

[elfismiles]

Screenland
Alex Jones Under Oath Is an Antidote to a ‘Post-Truth’ Age
By Charles Homans / April 17, 2019



Five days after Attorney General William Barr released his expectation-deflating summary of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspected Russia connections, a pair of videos appeared on YouTube, labeled “Alex Jones / Sandy Hook Video Deposition.” The hundreds of thousands of views those videos have accumulated attest to their appeal as a #Resistance consolation prize: Maybe it’s not a habitually lying president, but at least someone is getting called to account, under oath, for his role in the post-truthification of American public life.

Jones, the Trump-endorsed proprietor of the conspiracy-mongering Infowars media empire, is being sued for defamation by 10 families of children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. That mass shooting, Jones maintained until recently, was a hoax, perpetrated with the connivance of the victims’ parents — many of whom have found themselves harassed, threatened and in some cases hounded from their homes by believers in this conspiracy theory.

Some ambivalence is probably in order about the practice of publicly posting deposition videos. But in the particular case of Alex Jones — who swam happily in YouTube’s abyssal depths before being mostly banned for hate-speech-policy violations last August — you have to at least appreciate the karmic elegance of it. The deposition is the sort of thing you could imagine him experiencing in a particularly unpleasant dream. In the video, he sits at a table, much as he sits behind the desk on his flagship “The Alex Jones Show,” but he is not in charge of the production. Instead, he is compelled to answer the questions of a young attorney named Mark Bankston (offscreen and unseen), who over the course of more than three hours meticulously deconstructs the world that Jones has conjured for his audience.
Video
2:16Alex Jones Sandy Hook Deposition
CreditCreditVideo by Kaster Lynch Farrar & Ball LLP

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Bankston seems less interested in the “whys” of Jones’s universe — the ultimately unsolvable riddle of how fully Jones believes what he says on the air — than he is in the “hows”: the way information gets chopped and screwed on Infowars, distended and looped and played back into the public discourse. In a way, it’s an examination of the whole unstable architecture of influence in today’s politics. When a particularly cancerous meme surfaces in Trump’s Twitter feed, or when white supremacists suddenly materialize en masse in the streets of a college town, the operative question now always seems to be: Where the hell did that come from?

At one point, Bankston dials in on an April 2017 broadcast in which Jones and his colleague Rob Dew discuss the police inspection of the Sandy Hook school grounds after the shooting. “They’re finding people in the back woods that are dressed up in SWAT gear,” Dew says. Jones, in the video, agrees.

Bankston, in the deposition, reads this aloud and asks Jones: “That’s not true, is it?”

“I saw it on the national news,” Jones says.

“You saw somebody in SWAT gear in the woods?”

“Black and camouflage — the police arrested him, they said there was a SWAT drill in the area?” he offers hopefully.

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“No, Mr. Jones, I’m asking you: Did you see a video of a man in SWAT gear being arrested?”

Jones, like most conspiracy theorists, presents himself as a close reader of reality, scrutinizing the gaps in the official narrative that reveal the big lie. But when that close reading is itself subjected to a close reading, you realize that Jones’s appeal comes not from his attention to details but from the velocity with which he blows past them — the way he hurtles through an asteroid belt of informational debris on his way to explicating the galaxy-scale perfidy of his villains. The law, and Bankston, do the opposite. They bore patiently inward, toward particularity.

Jones pauses, stares off-camera, blinks. “I saw the helicopter, talking about it, they said they later arrested the man.”

“So when you told your audience he was dressed up in SWAT gear, that’s just something you made up, isn’t it? There’s nobody dressed up in SWAT gear.”
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“I do remember that being on the news,” Jones says.

“What being on the news?”

“The helicopter and the man behind the school. And the report of the guy in the SWAT gear and the police saying they arrested him, and later they said they didn’t —”

“Yeah, it’s two reporters with cameras! There’s reports about it. There’s no man in SWAT gear in that video, is there? That’s just something you made up.”

“Nope, I didn’t make it up,” Jones insists, defiantly but also a little plaintively.

Writing in The Daily Beast two years ago, the conservative commentator Matt Lewis placed Jones in the lineage of right-wing radio talkers like Rush Limbaugh, who had effectively reverse-engineered politics from pro-wrestling-style confrontational entertainment. The problem is that “politics is inherently different,” Lewis wrote. “The stakes are higher. And since ideas have consequences, our words can have grave consequences.”
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This was a sly turn of phrase. “Ideas have consequences” has been a conservative battle cry since 1948, when the acerbic anti-modernist Richard M. Weaver published a book-length polemic by that title bemoaning the decline of universal truth. “On the verbal level, we see ‘fact’ substituted for ‘truth,’ ” Weaver wrote. “With what pathetic trust does he” — the “average man” — “recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”

As with most adages, the use of “ideas have consequences” has become dumber with time. In the mouths of figures like Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza, it calcified into a sort of pretentious playground taunt: You liberals have facts, but we have ideas! Alex Jones surely would have appalled Weaver, but he represents the logical, self-parodying extreme of this rhetorical pose, filling in the outlines of an increasingly conservative-traditionalist worldview with ridiculous particulars about demons reincarnated as Clintons. Last week, Candace Owens, the video blogger and recent Infowars on-air presence, was called by House Republicans to testify in a hearing on white supremacy, where she insisted that the so-called Southern strategy — the Nixon-era Republican Party’s wooing of white Southern conservatives — “never happened.” It is not really possible anymore to say where Jones’s universe ends and mainstream conservatism begins.

What’s commonly lamented as post-truth politics is, if we’re being precise about it, really post-fact politics: not the death of a higher truth (belief in which has proved robust enough) but of that “great many small things.” Small things like whether or not there was a man in SWAT gear in those woods. They might not matter in politics anymore, but they do in a courtroom. “We have a right in this country to question things,” Jones protests at one point in the deposition. To which Bankston replies: “I’m not saying what you didn’t and did have a right to do. I’m just asking you what you did.”

Charles Homans is the magazine’s politics editor.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 20, 2019, on Page 7 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Third Degree. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeBy Charles Homans

April 17, 2019

Five days after Attorney General William Barr released his expectation-deflating summary of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspected Russia connections, a pair of videos appeared on YouTube, labeled “Alex Jones / Sandy Hook Video Deposition.” The hundreds of thousands of views those videos have accumulated attest to their appeal as a #Resistance consolation prize: Maybe it’s not a habitually lying president, but at least someone is getting called to account, under oath, for his role in the post-truthification of American public life.

Jones, the Trump-endorsed proprietor of the conspiracy-mongering Infowars media empire, is being sued for defamation by 10 families of children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. That mass shooting, Jones maintained until recently, was a hoax, perpetrated with the connivance of the victims’ parents — many of whom have found themselves harassed, threatened and in some cases hounded from their homes by believers in this conspiracy theory.

Some ambivalence is probably in order about the practice of publicly posting deposition videos. But in the particular case of Alex Jones — who swam happily in YouTube’s abyssal depths before being mostly banned for hate-speech-policy violations last August — you have to at least appreciate the karmic elegance of it. The deposition is the sort of thing you could imagine him experiencing in a particularly unpleasant dream. In the video, he sits at a table, much as he sits behind the desk on his flagship “The Alex Jones Show,” but he is not in charge of the production. Instead, he is compelled to answer the questions of a young attorney named Mark Bankston (offscreen and unseen), who over the course of more than three hours meticulously deconstructs the world that Jones has conjured for his audience.
Video
2:16Alex Jones Sandy Hook Deposition
CreditCreditVideo by Kaster Lynch Farrar & Ball LLP

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Bankston seems less interested in the “whys” of Jones’s universe — the ultimately unsolvable riddle of how fully Jones believes what he says on the air — than he is in the “hows”: the way information gets chopped and screwed on Infowars, distended and looped and played back into the public discourse. In a way, it’s an examination of the whole unstable architecture of influence in today’s politics. When a particularly cancerous meme surfaces in Trump’s Twitter feed, or when white supremacists suddenly materialize en masse in the streets of a college town, the operative question now always seems to be: Where the hell did that come from?

At one point, Bankston dials in on an April 2017 broadcast in which Jones and his colleague Rob Dew discuss the police inspection of the Sandy Hook school grounds after the shooting. “They’re finding people in the back woods that are dressed up in SWAT gear,” Dew says. Jones, in the video, agrees.

Bankston, in the deposition, reads this aloud and asks Jones: “That’s not true, is it?”

“I saw it on the national news,” Jones says.

“You saw somebody in SWAT gear in the woods?”

“Black and camouflage — the police arrested him, they said there was a SWAT drill in the area?” he offers hopefully.

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“No, Mr. Jones, I’m asking you: Did you see a video of a man in SWAT gear being arrested?”

Jones, like most conspiracy theorists, presents himself as a close reader of reality, scrutinizing the gaps in the official narrative that reveal the big lie. But when that close reading is itself subjected to a close reading, you realize that Jones’s appeal comes not from his attention to details but from the velocity with which he blows past them — the way he hurtles through an asteroid belt of informational debris on his way to explicating the galaxy-scale perfidy of his villains. The law, and Bankston, do the opposite. They bore patiently inward, toward particularity.

Jones pauses, stares off-camera, blinks. “I saw the helicopter, talking about it, they said they later arrested the man.”

“So when you told your audience he was dressed up in SWAT gear, that’s just something you made up, isn’t it? There’s nobody dressed up in SWAT gear.”
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“I do remember that being on the news,” Jones says.

“What being on the news?”

“The helicopter and the man behind the school. And the report of the guy in the SWAT gear and the police saying they arrested him, and later they said they didn’t —”

“Yeah, it’s two reporters with cameras! There’s reports about it. There’s no man in SWAT gear in that video, is there? That’s just something you made up.”

“Nope, I didn’t make it up,” Jones insists, defiantly but also a little plaintively.

Writing in The Daily Beast two years ago, the conservative commentator Matt Lewis placed Jones in the lineage of right-wing radio talkers like Rush Limbaugh, who had effectively reverse-engineered politics from pro-wrestling-style confrontational entertainment. The problem is that “politics is inherently different,” Lewis wrote. “The stakes are higher. And since ideas have consequences, our words can have grave consequences.”
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This was a sly turn of phrase. “Ideas have consequences” has been a conservative battle cry since 1948, when the acerbic anti-modernist Richard M. Weaver published a book-length polemic by that title bemoaning the decline of universal truth. “On the verbal level, we see ‘fact’ substituted for ‘truth,’ ” Weaver wrote. “With what pathetic trust does he” — the “average man” — “recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”

As with most adages, the use of “ideas have consequences” has become dumber with time. In the mouths of figures like Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza, it calcified into a sort of pretentious playground taunt: You liberals have facts, but we have ideas! Alex Jones surely would have appalled Weaver, but he represents the logical, self-parodying extreme of this rhetorical pose, filling in the outlines of an increasingly conservative-traditionalist worldview with ridiculous particulars about demons reincarnated as Clintons. Last week, Candace Owens, the video blogger and recent Infowars on-air presence, was called by House Republicans to testify in a hearing on white supremacy, where she insisted that the so-called Southern strategy — the Nixon-era Republican Party’s wooing of white Southern conservatives — “never happened.” It is not really possible anymore to say where Jones’s universe ends and mainstream conservatism begins.

What’s commonly lamented as post-truth politics is, if we’re being precise about it, really post-fact politics: not the death of a higher truth (belief in which has proved robust enough) but of that “great many small things.” Small things like whether or not there was a man in SWAT gear in those woods. They might not matter in politics anymore, but they do in a courtroom. “We have a right in this country to question things,” Jones protests at one point in the deposition. To which Bankston replies: “I’m not saying what you didn’t and did have a right to do. I’m just asking you what you did.”

Charles Homans is the magazine’s politics editor.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.
A version of this article appears in print on April 20, 2019, on Page 7 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Third Degree. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/maga ... -oath.html

NY Times Releases Bizarre Sandy Hook 2nd Shooter Story (VIDEO)
Man wearing camo pants handcuffed by police and dragged out of the woods?
The Alex Jones Show - April 18, 2019

NY Times Releases Bizarre Sandy Hook 2nd Shooter Story
The NY Times has written another hit piece on Alex Jones.
This time it is on events surrounding Sandy Hook that are easily provable.

https://www.infowars.com/ny-times-relea ... ter-story/

[seemslikeadream]

Sandy Hook father awarded $450,000 from defamation suit

Noah Pozner, 6, was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

New York (CNN) — Leonard Pozner, whose son 6-year-old Noah was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, was awarded $450,000 in damages by a Wisconsin jury from a defamation lawsuit filed in response to conspiracy theorists claiming the Newtown tragedy never occurred.

James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, co-authors of the 2016 book titled, "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook" claimed that the shooting -- where 26 people died, among them 20 children -- was a staged political scheme, rather than a tragic massacre that took many lives on December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.

The book falsely states that Pozner fabricated his son Noah's death certificate. The writers also claimed that Noah was not a real person, and alternatively, that he was not Pozner's son, according to the complaint.

Judge Frank D. Remington of Wisconsin's Dane County Circuit Court ruled in June that the statements by Fetzer were defamatory, and the case went to trial to determine damages. The jury's decision was made Tuesday, officials at Dane County Court told CNN.

"I have now had to defend my son's existence against these hoaxers for longer than he was alive," Pozner told CNN Wednesday.

"For many years, I attempted to use the legal system to get hoaxers like Mr. Fetzer to stop attacking me and terrorizing my family."

Pozner hopes the ruling in his case helps others pursue legal action against conspiracy theorists looking to spread lies.

"Today, I believe that hesitation ends and the countless other victims of Mr. Fetzer and other conspiracy theorists like him who use the internet to harass and defame, will now have the ability to pursue legal action against their abusers," he said.

"It was a classic SLAPP suit brilliantly executed by narrowly focusing on a conclusion for which we have acquired enormous evidential support," Fetzer told CNN when reached for comment.

Despite the court's determinations and issuance of an official death certificate from the Connecticut Department of Public Health, Vital Records Division, Fetzer maintains that the tragedy was an Obama-administration "drill where no kids died to promote gun control."

Palacek and the book publisher's parent company Wrongs Without Remedies LLC both settled with Pozner and their cases were dismissed.
Fetzner is solely responsible for the payment awarded to Pozner.

CNN was unable to reach Palacek for comment.

A post-trial status conference is scheduled for Monday. Fetzner said he will appeal the case in its entirety.

Pozner has created a website in honor of his son Noah. "We miss the music of his full-bellied laughter, the warmth of his hugs, and the twinkle in his beautiful eyes with an indescribable, timeless sorrow," a message on the site reads.
CNN's Julian Cummings contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/us/sandy ... index.html

[chump]

Fetzer explained that,

…The case was a logical absurdity from the beginning.  The Complaint claims that, because the death certificate that Defendants—in particular, Defendant Fetzer—described as a “fabrication” did not “differ in any material respect” from the death certificate attached to the Complaint, the Defendants had defamed the Plaintiff. But the certificate attached to the Complaint had both Town Registrar and State certifications, which mark the difference between death certificates that are prima facie authentic and death certificates that are not.  What could possibly be more “material”?  Plaintiff was resorting to the fallacy known as “bait and switch” from the beginning, using an artfully composed Complaint to saddle the Defendants with an offense they had not committed.

You will see the grounds on which I am appealing this case, where the most blatant violation of my rights occurred when the Court decided that there was no dispute about the authenticity of the death certificate, when I had the reports of two forensic document examiners to the contrary—and where, because it lacked the certification of the Town Registrar, the death certificate that I had described in the book as a “fabrication” IS a fabrication! It was “a very simple case”, which was wrongly decided… “

[chump]

https://www.middletownpress.com/middlet ... 934598.php

Former state medical examiner Wayne Carver dies at 67
By Robert Marchant Updated 6:15 pm EST, Friday, December 27, 2019


MIDDLETOWN — Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, the former chief medical examiner who analyzed forensic evidence in some of the state’s most high-profile criminal cases, has died at the age of 67.

During his career, Carver provided evidence that resulted in a conviction in the so-called “wood chipper murder” and described to jurors how Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old Greenwich High School student, died after she was struck with a golf club and then stabbed through the neck with the broken shaft.

Carver also assisted in the investigation of the shooting rampage that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012. He performed the autopsy on the gunman as well as his victims.

Carver died at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown on Thursday, the Hartford Courant is reporting. He was a resident of Old Saybrook.

He began working in the medical examiner’s office in 1982 and took over the leadership position in 1989. When Carver retired in 2013, he was cited for his professionalism.

“Dr. Carver demonstrated time and time again that the OCME serves the needs of all of the citizens of Connecticut, and that those who deal with the office are entitled to be treated with equanimity, compassion and respect,” said Todd Fernow, chairman of the oversight board for the medical examiner’s office.

Among his most notable cases was the wood chipper murder, in which Richard Crafts was accused of killing his wife, Helle, in Newtown in 1986 and then disposing of her body using heavy equipment. Forensic scientist Henry Lee showed jurors fragments of bone, and Carver ran an experiment that put a dead frozen pig through a wood chipper to demonstrate how the bone fragments would appear. The forensic work helped convince the jury that Crafts had murdered his wife even though her body was never found, and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Carver was also a naturalist who logged the habits of ospreys nesting in the marshes of Old Saybrook for a database.

As he told a local news site in Old Saybrook, he had a fascination with the natural world from an early age.

“I used to take my sports toys and link them together to make a lab,” said Wayne. “I was a brilliant goof-off in school, but I aced my tests. At high school, I had a great series of science teachers ... I hung around with a bunch of science geeks.”

He was also a serious musician.

Carver graduated from Brown University and gained his medical degree there.

As an educator, Carver instructed medical students around the state, and he also worked with law students and police cadets.

Dr. James R. Gill succeeded Carver as the state’s chief medical examiner in 2013.
rmarchant@greenwichtime.com

[elfismiles]

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ordered to pay $100,000 in Sandy Hook case
Infowars host used his show to promote the theory that the shooting, which killed 20 children and six educators, was a hoax
Associated Press
Tue 31 Dec 2019 17.22 EST
Last modified on Wed 1 Jan 2020 15.32 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... acy-theory

Sandy Hook father awarded $450,000 from defamation suit
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/us/sandy ... index.html