D.C. pizzeria gunman speaks out

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Edgar Maddison Welch, who has admitted to being the gunman who opened fire inside of the Washington, D.C., pizzeria Comet Ping Pong on Sunday, expressed regret in a new interview with the New York Times.

“I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” he told the paper Wednesday, speaking via videoconference from an old hospital building next to a city jail.

No one was injured by the gunfire, but Welch’s actions drew national attention because he was motivated by a fringe conspiracy theory about the pizzeria. Police say Welch told them he wanted to “self-investigate” the theory, which purported that Comet is the center of a child-sex ring involving Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief.

He told the Times that he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering” at the pizza shop, and he wanted to “shine some light” on the supposed misdeeds taking place there.

“The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he admitted, saying he recently had Internet service installed and his online research left him with the “impression something nefarious was happening.”

He also said he listens to talk radio host Alex Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist who has even questioned the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six adults.

Notably, federal authorities said Wednesday that a Sandy Hook conspiracy theory motivated a Florida woman to threaten a parent whose child was killed at the elementary school. The woman, Lucy Richards, was charged with four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce.

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