What’s the Real Score Behind the Connecticut Massacre?

Has media’s account of the regrettable events at Newtown Connecticut been factually accurate? Or have they have been distorted to promote certain political agenda?

Paul Craig Roberts at the Lewrockwell.com raises some salient points by pointing at loopholes and inconsistencies in media's reporting.

But why RT Moscow’s focus on “assault weapons”? The accused, Adam Lanza, was immediately declared guilty. According to the Associated Press, the Newtown, Connecticut medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver said that “all the victims of the Connecticut elementary school shooting were killed up close by multiple rifle shots.”

Yet Fox News reports that “A CNN reporter said police recovered three weapons at the scene: a Glock and a Sig-Sauer, which are handguns, as well as a .223 Bushmaster rifle. The rifle was in the back seat of the car the gunman drove to the school, the handguns were inside the school.”

The same Fox News report says: “Security measures implemented this year at Sandy Hook [the school] kept doors locked during class hours, and people have to be buzzed in before entering. There is a camera to view whoever enters the building.” If this report is correct, how did an armed Lanza gain entry to the school?

I tried to point out to RT Moscow that these news reports indicate that the accused dead gunman, whom no one can interrogate, if he is indeed the culprit, killed the children with handguns, not with an “assault rifle” left in the car, but that the medical examiner said the children were killed with rifle shots.

The discrepancy is obvious. Either the news reports are incorrect, the medical examiner is wrong, or someone other than Adam Lanza shot the children.

Reporting based on political agenda?

The focus on “assault weapons” is puzzling for another reason. According to news reports Lanza had a personality or mental disorder, or perhaps he was just different.

Regardless, he was on medication. So does the blame lie with guns or with medication?

As the agenda is to ban guns, the blame is placed on guns.

In the previous mass shooting at the Colorado movie theater, eyewitness accounts differed from the official account, and according to news accounts the suspect was involved with the government in some sort of mind control experiments and was found after the shooting sitting in a car in the movie theater parking lot.

Similarly, the Connecticut school shooting has puzzling aspects. In the real time report to the police, a teacher says that she saw “two shadows running past the gym.” The police radio recording also reports two men in a van at the school stopped and detained, and various news sources report that the police arrested a man in the nearby woods. The man says, “I didn’t do it,” but how would a man out in the woods know what had just happened? There are no TVs to watch in the woods; yet, the man denied doing the shooting. Very strange.

What often happens is that there are a number of initial false reports, such as in the Connecticut case the report that Lanza’s mother was a teacher at the school and was killed at the school, that Lanza had also killed his father, and that Lanza’s brother might have been involved. Any discrepancies in the official story then get thrown out with the false reports. As the media simply goes along with the official story and does not investigate, it is impossible to know what really happened. People just accept the official story.

Could Adam Lanza have been a fall guy?

Drone Warfare: Systematic Mass Killing of Innocents

It is sad and revolting to see how the recent gruesome shooting spree in Newtown Connecticut had claimed 27 innocent lives mostly children.

Yet what has been largely ignored by the public is how belligerent imperial US foreign policies continues to sow terror to unarmed civilians through drone warfare overseas.

This report from Daily Mail says that a US military personnel quit his job after learning of needless civilian deaths…many of them children.

A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.

Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.

But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

'I saw men, women and children die during that time,' he told Spiegel Online. 'I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all.'

Mass killings should be seen in a broader context and not just in the US.

As John Aziz at the lewrockwell.com/zero hedge observed: (bold original)

And if we value life and are opposed to violence against innocents, why do we demand action when 27 innocent Americans die, but not when larger numbers of innocent Pakistanis, or Afghanis or Yemenis die? One drone strike in Pakistan killed 69 children, dwarfing the impact of the Newtown Massacre. With predator drones now in American skies, how long until the “collateral damage” (remember – the NDAA declared the entirety of America as a battlefield) eclipses the Newtown massacre? Or how long until a foreign power or terrorist group hacks into a predator drone (technically feasible) over America and uses it as a flying bomb?  And how many more terrorist attacks against America will be fuelled by anger derived from the civilian casualties of the drone wars?

Obama might cry for Americans in Newtown, but where are his tears for the Pakistani and Yemeni children he has slaughtered? And what about for the many victims who died as a result of thousands guns shipped by the US government to the Mexican drug cartels via Fast and Furious?

The US government seem to promote the kind of policies it pretends to condemn. Drones as pointed out above (and in my previous post) is likely to become a commonplace security feature in the US which may entail the unintended consequences described above.

Yet it is hard to ignore of the possible influence of US foreign policies or the warfare state on her constituency or population. Or put differently, could the recent killing sprees signify as a policy blowback, where these assailants may have sublimely construed government's action as justifying their own? 

Timeline of Mass Shooting Incidents during the Last Two Decades

Following the Colorado Denver massacre at the midnight showing of ‘Dark Knight”, here is a compilation or a list of mass shooting incidents as reported by Chicago Tribune/Reuters.com

Here is a timeline of some of the worst shooting incidents carried out by one or two gunmen around the world in the last 25 years:

March 13, 1996 - BRITAIN - Gunman Thomas Hamilton burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.

April 28, 1996 - AUSTRALIA - Martin Bryant unleashed modern Australia's worst mass murder when he shot dead 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern state of Tasmania.

April 1999 - UNITED STATES - Two heavily-armed teenagers went on a rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Denver, shooting 13 students and staff before taking their own lives.

July 1999 - UNITED STATES - A gunman killed nine people at two brokerages in Atlanta, after apparently killing his wife and two children. He committed suicide five hours later.

June 2001 - NEPAL - Eight members of the Nepalese Royal family were killed in a palace massacre by Crown Prince Dipendra who later turned a gun on himself and died few days later. His youngest brother also died later raising the death toll to 10.

April 26, 2002 - GERMANY - In Erfurt, eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself.

October 2002 - UNITED STATES - John Muhammad and Lee Malvo killed 10 people in sniper-style shooting deaths that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area.

April 16, 2007 - USA - Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest rampage in U.S. history when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

November 7, 2007 - FINLAND - Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki.

September 23, 2008 - FINLAND - Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.

March 11, 2009 - GERMANY - A 17-year-old gunman dressed in combat gear killed nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart. He also killed one other person at a nearby clinic. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Two additional passers-by were killed and two policemen seriously injured, bringing the death toll to 16 including the gunman.

June 2, 2010 - BRITAIN - Gunman Derrick Bird opened fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people were killed and 11 injured. Bird also killed himself.

April 9, 2011 - NETHERLANDS - Tristan van der Vlis opened fire in the Ridderhof mall in Alphen aan den Rijn, south of Amsterdam, killing six before turning the gun on himself.

July 22, 2011 - NORWAY - Police seize a gunman who killed 69 people at a youth summer camp of Norway's ruling political party, on the small, holiday island of Utoeya. Anders Behring Breivik is later charged with the killings, as well as with an earlier bombing in Oslo which killed eight people. The trial ended last month with Breivik saying that his bombing and shooting rampage was necessary to defend the country - prompting a walk-out by relatives of his victims.

December 13, 2011 - BELGIUM - Gunman Nordine Armani killed three people, including a 17-month-old toddler, wounding 121 in a central square in the eastern city of Liege, before shooting himself. The next day Belgian investigators found the body of a woman in warehouse used by the gunman raising the death toll, including the killer, to five.

July 20, 2012 - UNITED STATES - A masked gunman killed 14 people and wounded 50 others when he opened fire on moviegoers at a showing of new Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in the city of Denver.