Defamation, lies, guns and Sandy Hook

The Shooting

14th of December, 2012. An ordinary Friday morning. People wake up in Newtown, a 27,000 people town in Connecticut; kids get ready to go to school, parents get ready to go to work. In one of these houses, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shoots and kills his mother while she’s still in bed wearing her pyjamas. Afterwards, he steals a number of her guns and drives her car five miles to the school he attended as a child. Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The story of Sandy Hook is one that shook the nation and the world. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle, two semiautomatic pistols and multiple rounds of ammunition, Lanza first shot through a window to gain access to the school. When the school principal and school psychologist went to investigate the cause of the noise, they were shot and killed. Lanza then entered two first-grade classrooms. In the first, he gunned down two teachers and fifteen students. In the second, two teachers and five students. All twenty children killed were under the age of seven.

Lanza killed himself in a classroom around 9:40 a.m. when he heard the police approaching.

The Aftermath

The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech. It still remains one of America’s most notorious mass shootings. As expected, the tragedy was followed by countless pleads to introduce harsher gun control regulation in a country where ownership of weapons is treated as one of its most fundamental rights. After all, if the death of 20 elementary school children isn’t enough to convince skeptics that federal gun control laws must change, what will? Something that the rest of the world seems to agree upon, (that in a developed country there is no space for the fear of being killed at school, which should be a safe place to learn and grow, not somewhere you can be traumatised at by witnessing your classmates being murdered or fearing for your life), is not seen as a priority at the same level as gun ownership in the United States.

Almost 9 years after Sandy Hook not only federal gun control laws have barely changed, but mass shootings are up. The gun industry continues to produce assault weapons and high-capacity magazines without additional federal restrictions. Gun sales are on the rise. Shocking.

The Update

The Sandy Hook mass shooting is once again making headlines. Not because any progress has been made in outlawing or even regulating assault firearms (the national nonprofit organisation Sandy Hook Promise, founded and led by several family members whose loved ones were killed, “envisions a future where children are free from shootings and acts of violence in their schools, homes, and communities”), but because Alex Jones has now been found liable in all defamation lawsuits brought forward by multiple parents of victims against him.

The Lawsuits

Alex Jones, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist, has long claimed on his radio show and InfoWars website that the Sandy Hook Elementary school attack was "completely fake" and a "giant hoax”. He implied that the parents were actors seeking to undermine laws allowing private gun ownership.

The first lawsuit was filed in Texas in 2017, where Jones lived and worked. It read that since the day of the shooting he had alleged that the massacre “did not happen, that it was staged by the government and concealed using actors, and that the parents of the victims are participants in a horrifying cover-up”. As a response, Jones published a video titled "Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed” insinuating that Ms De La Rosa, a mother involved in the lawsuit, was an actor.

Later on, a separate lawsuit was filed by a parent who claimed that Mr Jones accused him of “lying about holding his son's body with a bullet hole in his head”.

"This heartless and vile act of defamation re-ignited the Sandy Hook 'false flag' conspiracy and tore open the emotional wounds that plaintiff has tried so desperately to heal," the complaint said.

Several other defamation lawsuits were brought against him for his claims on the attack. While Jones eventually acknowledged the shooting took place, he kept denying wronging the families. His lawyers argued his comments were protected by free speech rights.

The Rulings

In a 2019 ruling, a Texas judge said Jones had repeatedly failed to hand over legal documents and evidence to the court to support his claims about the attack. As a result, a default judgement was issued, making him responsible to pay legal costs to the parents of the six-year-old children.

The last remaining open case, a lawsuit filed by eight families of victims in Connecticut, received its ruling this Monday 15th of November. A Connecticut superior court judge found Mr Jones liable by default after he once again refused to turn over documents ordered by the courts, including financial records. As a result, the families of 10 victims have now been granted “sweeping victories” in all four defamation lawsuits against him.

Lawyers accused the conspiracy theorist of profiting from the false claims he made about the shooting and of avoiding sharing documents for years. Further jury hearings will be held in both states next year to determine how much he should pay in damages to the families, in addition to their legal costs.

Jones has already been banned by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the past for hate speech and abusive behaviour.

Sadly, these are not the only vicious comments the families have had to dealt with. Parents of Sandy Hook victims have spoken publicly about their experiences of being targeted by trolls, both online and in person. In June 2017, a Florida woman who believed the attack was fabricated was sentenced to five months in prison for making death threats against one of the fathers by phone and email. It truly is a tragedy that there’s people who would rather be despicable and hateful towards those that are grieving after experiencing the worst pain imaginable, than facing a staggering reality: that guns can and do and will kill innocent people.

Alex Jones now whines that the U.S. is “dead” because Sandy Hook parents won their defamation suit against him.

What’s really dead are the 20 little kids (most of whom would be just 15 today) and 6 teachers, whose killings he said were a “giant hoax”.