re: Father of Child Murdered at Sandy Hook Faces Death Threats

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Those who question are not questioning because there are despicable people in this world.

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The CT's question any and everything because they simply look at our government as all encompassingly devious, vile, corrupt, dishonest,

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Not saying that shades of those elements don't exist in government.

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But not all encompassingly.

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And certainly not to the point of staging a Sandy Hook or planting bombs in the twin towers or any stupid shite such as that.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. Blogger Joe Quinn obtained the police audio, which 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"The classic conspiracy theorist sees the hidden hand in everything. Nothing is as it seems," he added. "There's something bigger that's going on. They dont know where it is, but they are willing to tantalize people and throw out any number of suggestions, which are oftentimes contradictory."

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In addition, truthers have claimed that the victims' parents didn't express the proper level of grief. However, by cherry-picking certain portions of certain news clips, evidence to such claims becomes "beneath worthless and is actually misleading," Robert Blaskiewicz, writer for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and co-editor of the blog Skeptical Humanities, said in an email to HuffPost. "Doing that means ignoring (or simply rejecting) vast quantities of evidence that doesn't support their conclusion."

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Compiled together, this "evidence" not only addresses a theory, but also a much larger issue: Most conspiracy theorists have a very specific agenda, the experts said.

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"What I think we are looking at in the video is an attempt to find evidence to fit a preexisting narrative, that the government is or is quickly becoming a tyranny and that the only thing stopping the government from terrorizing the nation is that the populace is armed," Blaskiewicz said.

Blaskiewicz added that such a diseased investigative process is almost always guaranteed to fail.

"The only possible answer at the end of that process of investigation is some sort of omnipotent puppet master who controls everything. In this case, it's the government, but it's often Jews, the New World Order, the other political party, the Illuminati, Masons, or even inter-dimensional mind-controlling reptilian space aliens who impersonate political leaders."

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Knock yourself out with these folks

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Wait, you don't believe Sandy Hook was a hoax. So what are you still doing in this thread?

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