Alex Jones seeks new trial after Sandy Hook verdict of almost $1 billion
By Tom Fitton
26 October 2016
One of the “sad truths” about the aftermath of the recent mass killings in Connecticut was the mass media bias and misrepresentation of the information coming out of the official gun-control groups and the gun manufacturer lobbies. In the wake of the horror that befell Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the New York Times and other liberal news outlets were eager to proclaim that a ban on “assault weapons,” one of the principal targets of the gun groups and the gun industry, “would have kept Adam Lanza’s mother in his sights.”
This was a lie. The only issue about the mass murders of children in Sandy Hook was the fact that Lanza “had easy access to guns he could have used in the massacre.” If Sandy Hook had been a city, instead of a school in rural Newtown, the issue about having easy access to assault weapons in the hands of mass murderers would have been front and center.
More than anything else, the gun lobby’s main argument was that “assault weapons” don’t kill people in large numbers. (The U.S. government has no such regulations.) In the case of Sandy Hook, the argument was that a ban would have had little effect, since the “rate of mass shootings” is not high enough.
This is not a new position, but it gained currency only after the Sandy Hook tragedy. Prior to that, gun activists and gun manufacturers had been more or less content to claim that the “assault rifles” could not kill many people because they had too many “features” which made them extremely suitable for self-defense, and therefore could not be used to murder large numbers of people.
But since the Sandy Hook massacre, the gun lobby has discovered a way to redefine “assault weapons,” so that it can once again be used to ban “assault weapons” on some spurious grounds. If it could not kill many people in mass shootings, it could be used to kill many people in self-defense, but not to kill many people in mass shootings.
This was the position taken by the gun lobby when the assault weapons ban was pushed in the 1990s. This is also the same position held by the gun lobby in the wake of the recent