Free Republic

In his final weeks as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg is getting his last word in on local legislation, from tobacco sales to public Wi-Fi. Bloomberg has a few words left for Washington, too. The mayor called on Congress to "end the national epidemic of gun violence" during a Thursday press conference, two days before the one-year anniversary the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., that claimed innocent 26 lives. "It's important that we remember all those that we lost and their families. The anniversary will obviously be a very painful time for them and a painful time,...

The Washington Post (WaPo) is asking readers to submit their "gun violence" stories for the first anniversary of the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary. (snip)

Full Title: "Newtown anniversary: US schools keep trying wrong fixes to deter school shootings, experts say." It happened after Columbine, after Virginia Tech, and after Newtown, too. After every massacre in a school, Americans grasp at quick cures. Let's install metal detectors and give guns to teachers. Let's crack down on troublemakers, weeding out kids who fit the profile of a gunman. Let's buy bulletproof whiteboards for the students to scurry behind, or train kids to throw erasers or cans of soup at an attacker.

The University of the Incarnate Word is a highly-rated Catholic college in San Antonio, Texas. It is hardly a hot bed of campus violence. When senior Robert Cameron Redus was pulled-over last Friday by campus police for “erratically speeding,” it is unlikely he had any clue of how tragically the stop would end. The campus police department contends Redus, an honors student set to graduate in May, grabbed the officer’s steel baton during a struggle. Not in dispute, however, is that Redus was shot five times by the officer, at close range, leaving him dead and the University scrambling to...

In the dry, neutral language used in these types of missives, the just-released official report on the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School sidesteps any determination of causality or assignment of blame. Even though the shooter, Adam Lanza, had “significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life,” and even though he had “familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders,” the report says that there was no evidence that he intended to commit such a crime himself. Official reports may not draw conclusions, but we can.

At a news conference Monday, Newtown First Selectman Patricia Llodra had a message for the national and international media looking to cover the one-year anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School: Stay away. "Please respect our need to be alone," Llodra said. "To be quiet and to have that personal time to continue on our journey of grief in the way that serves us." It appears many media outlets are doing just that. Virtually all major U.S. cable and network news organizations — which flooded the town of 27,000 in the days and weeks following the tragedy —...

It wasn’t quite cold enough to need a vest on a mid-November Texas morning, but Matt Dossey was wearing one anyway. Made of heavy-weight beige canvas, the vest just might have been concealing a pistol. There was no way to tell. Perhaps that was the point.

The pundits may have thought that Barack Obama’s efforts to exploit the Sandy Hook School tragedy on December 14, 2012, where a mentally ill young man killed 20 elementary school students and 6 teachers, had been tabled for lack of support. Now we learn that Obama’s Organizing for Action super pac is exploiting the one-year anniversary with fake memorials in order to resume the push for gun control. Along with the efforts to reach adults are those to reach children in schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of Obama’s education initiative called Common Core (recently admitted...

Officers stopped well short of school, approached by foot State police investigating the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have focused some of their efforts on the police response, interviewing local officers to iron out inconsistencies in their versions of events .... "We know that our response will be heavily scrutinized as it should be and I am confident that our officers acted aggressively and appropriately in response to a chaotic scene,'' police union President Scott Ruszczyk said. "I think it's pretty tough to second-guess the guys who were there responding to a chaotic scene." Among the aspects of the response...

Nancy Lanza took her killer son Adam shooting from the age of just four, may have lied on federal paperwork to buy him guns and went on long holidays alone without the boy she branded a 'lost cause', a new book reveals today. It lays out the strongest case yet against the mother of the Sandy Hook shooter - just days after parents of the victims said her 'bad parenting' was partly to blame. Nancy knew as far back as 2000 that there was ‘something very wrong’ with the boy and effectively abandoned her disturbed son last year while she...

Newtown police responded rapidly to last December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and followed department procedures upon arrival, according to a report released Thursday by the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association. At the request of the Newtown Police Department, the chiefs association analyzed the police response and issued a nine-page report Thursday, a day after police released recordings of 911 calls from the morning of the shootings. The chiefs report said the first Newtown officers were on the scene less than three minutes after the initial 911 call, which came from a woman inside the building. The report said officers followed...

As we approach the somber anniversary of the mass shooting inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, Channel 3 Eyewitness News has made the decision to stay out of Newtown that day out of respect for the community. Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra made a plea on Face the State with Dennis House on Sunday for the media to stay away from Newtown on Dec. 14, the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook. "We truly need this time as a community to reflect, to be personal, to be with each other to continue that journey, that grief journey without the...

Recordings of 911 calls from last year's Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were released Wednesday, and they not only paint a picture of anguish and tension inside the building, they also show Newtown dispatchers mobilizing help, reassuring callers and urging them to take cover..... The calls were made public under a court order after a lengthy effort by The Associated Press. Prosecutors had argued that releasing the recordings would only cause more anguish for the victims' families.... One of the first callers to Newtown police was a woman who said in a trembling, out-of-breath voice: "I think there's somebody shooting...

<p>HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Recordings of several 911 calls made from inside Sandy Hook Elementary during last year's school shooting are being released under court order Wednesday after a legal fight by The Associated Press.</p> <p>The AP has been asking for an opportunity to review the tapes, which will now be released Wednesday to the news cooperative in addition to other media organizations.</p>

Nicole Hockley, whose child was tragically murdered at Sandy Hook last year, said that background checks would not have prevented shooter Adam Lanza from getting the guns he used to carry out the atrocities. She also stated that the 911 tapes from that day should not be released.

If you thought Obama's Organizing for Action propaganda machine couldn't get anymore ghoulish in the name of politics, it just did. Late yesterday the organization sent out an email to supporters urging them to hold events on December 14 for the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. At first, this seems harmless.

The report released by Connecticut yesterday on Adam Lanza’s massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown makes clear how well we protected his civil rights. The report details his “mental health issues,” which in reality were strong evidence that he had developed a severe mental illness. He had been afflicted with an autism-like syndrome since childhood and had been formally diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder. This diagnosis by itself is not associated with an increased propensity for violent behavior. However, in recent years, Lanza had developed symptoms of a more severe mental illness, which occurs in approximately 5 percent...

Editor's Note: Tactical Defense Institute's John Benner rarely weighs in on issues, leaving that function to others. When John addresses an issue it is noteworthy and well worth the read. This article was originally posted on the TDI Facebook page. Republished with permission. by John Benner The official report from the Connecticut States Attorney's office on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre has been released. This horrific event has had a tremendous impact in many ways. My belief is the impact was so strong, not based on numbers killed, but the age of the 20 very young children murdered. The...

Relatives of three victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre have spoken out following the release this week of the long-awaited report into the shooting....

Investigators in Connecticut released a report yesterday concerning the December 2011 murders in Newtown. It says the shooter was "obsessed" with mass murders. From the Wall Street Journal: During their search of the (redacted) home, law-enforcement officials found a spreadsheet that tracked mass murders over the years, including the names of the assailants and information about each incident. They also found a "large amount of materials relating to Columbine shootings" as well as a "computer game titled 'School Shooting' where the player controls a character who enters a school and shoots at students" and "commercial movies depicting mass shootings," the...