Seized from Adam Lanza’s house: Gawker has a breakdown of the unsealed search warrants from after the Newtown shooting. This is one of many lists of the things acquired from the home.
» A caveat: Be careful not to overly lean on this speculation, however. After CBS published their story, they added this note: “In response to this piece, Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police told CBS News that the investigation into the motive for the Newtown shooting has not been completed and therefore any statements about the shooter’s intent are mere speculation.”
Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, more than a half million cards, letters, and drawings have been sent to the people of Newtown, Connecticut, from around the world. These messages of love, sadness, and hope have been on display in the town hall and viewed there by many residents and visitors. Now they’ll have a permanent home — on Tumblr. Brought to you by Mother Jones, in partnership with Tumblr’s Storyboard.
A reminder of the value of a well-considered concept and a little hard work. Spend a few minutes here today. You will gain a lot from this.
Although the investigation is still under way, we are aware of no facts or legal theory under which the State of Connecticut should be liable for causing the harms inflicted at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen • Discussing, in a statement, a $100 million legal claim filed against the state, which has since been withdrawn, regarding the Sandy Hook shooting. The lawyer, Irv Pinsky, filed the claim upon request of a survivor’s family. (He later withdrew the claim, stating that there was new evidence to research, but he may refile later.) The withdrawn claim stated that the state did not do enough to prevent “foreseeable harm” or offer a “safe school setting.” “We all know it’s going to happen again,” Pinsky claimed last week. “Society has to take action.”
Earlier today, the New York Post put up a story discussing Ryan Lanza’s Facebook page and statements that he allegedly made to the newspaper, the first made since his brother committed the Newtown shooting (something he was initially falsely accused of). Funny story about that: They got duped and ran with a story based on a fake page with the username “Official.RyanLanza01”, because clearly the New York Post can’t figure out that a Facebook page was created this week. (Apparently the statements were made through Facebook chat, on top of that.) Good work dragging this kid’s name through the mud all over again.
And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal. There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Splatterhouse.’National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre • Taking a swipe at a number of video games during his speech on Friday—where he also suggested that the solution to school shootings was having armed policemen at each school. Mind you, two of these games, Splatterhouse and Mortal Kombat, have each been around in various forms for two decades or longer, though both have had relatively recent entries. Anyway, can we call them the National Retro Association? It’s like they traveled back in time and pulled these lines out of the mouths of analysts in the wake of Columbine.
Ah, good catch! Here’s a bit from Bloomberg discussing this angle of the issue more in depth.
Dick’s Sporting Goods suspends sale of certain semi-automatics
CNN:
Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the world, says it has removed all guns from its store nearest to Newtown, Connecticut, and is suspending the sale of certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles from its chains nationwide.
The move was made out of respect for the victims and families of last week’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting “during this time of national mourning,” the store said in a statement Tuesday morning.Photo: An American flag at the center of Newtown, Connecticut, stands at half-staff on Dec. 14. (John Makely / NBC News)
Related to the prior post.
The private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management said on Tuesday that it would sell its investment in the gunmaker Freedom Group in response to the school shootings last week in Connecticut.
Cerberus acquired Bushmaster — the manufacturer of the rifle used by the gunman in the Newtown attacks that killed 27 people, including 20 schoolchildren — in 2006.
The private equity giant later merged it with other gun companies to create Freedom Group, which reported net sales of $677.3 million for the nine months that ended in September 2012, a 20 percent increase compared with the same period last year.
Holy wow. That is a huge harbinger. (ht @BuzzfeedBen)
I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.Megan McArdle’s solution to preventing mass shootings, as pointed out by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “But I doubt we’re going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or ‘reasonable gun control’ which is going to prevent all of these attacks. Which is to say, admitting that we have no box big enough to completely contain evil,” she continues. Oh, so it’s an explanation to tell us that gun control won’t work… I think?!
I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything. It must change everything. We all must begin anew and demand that Washington’s old way of doing business is no longer acceptable. Entertainment moguls don’t have an absolute right to glorify murder while spreading mayhem in young minds across America. And our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-style, high-caliber, semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want.
It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas. It’s time for politicians to start focusing more on protecting our schoolyards than putting together their next fundraiser. It’s time for Washington to stop trying to win endless wars overseas when we’re losing the war at home … For the sake of my four children and yours, I choose life and I choose change.
Scarborough, when still in Congress, was notably aligned with the NRA and previously espoused libertarian views on the issue.
Sunday’s New York Times front page does something the paper of record has rarely, if ever, done before: It leads with a black box rather than an image, with zero photos taking up the top half of the page. It also downplays the suspect significantly. (ht @thomaskaplan)
Before I started at BuzzFeed, I worked at My Place Pizza, a Newtown staple, from the age of 15 through 22. On a typical Friday, by far the busiest night of the week, we made 300-400 pies. I can’t help wonder how many pizzas My Place made this past Friday night.
I was there on September 11, 2001, and making pizzas proved to be an effective way to take my mind off what was happening 50 miles away. On Friday morning, working at a job that requires me to stare at Twitter all day, I didn’t have the luxury of work as an escape, of distracting me from that 50-mile divide. I heard the news of the shooting at 9:30, and didn’t take my eyes off Twitter for the next 10 hours as things played out in a strange and confusing way. By noon, I had to turn off my phone. I simply posted on Facebook: “Thank you for all your texts, emails, tweets, gchats. No one from my family is in Newtown at this time. Everyone is okay.”
That had to have been a tough one to write, but the perspective is enlightening. Thanks Mike for being willing to share.
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