A man who found six children in his driveway in Newtown, Conn., after their teacher had been shot and killed in last month's school massacre has become the target of conspiracy theorists who believe the shootings were staged.
“I don’t know what to do,” Gene Rosen told Salon.com. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘How much am I being paid?'”
Rosen, a 69-year-old retired psychologist who lives near Sandy Hook Elementary School where the shootings took place, says his inbox is filled with emails like this one:
How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?
“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” Rosen said, adding that he's sought the advice of a retired state police officer and plans to alert the FBI.
On the morning of Dec. 14, Rosen had just finished feeding his cats when he saw six small children "sitting in a neat semicircle" at the end of his driveway. According to the Associated Press:
A school bus driver was standing over them, telling them things would be all right. It was about 9:30 a.m., and the children, he discovered, had just run from the school to escape a gunman.
"We can't go back to school," one little boy told Rosen. "Our teacher is dead."
Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, had shot his way into the school and opened fire, killing 20 children and six adults.
Rosen took the four girls and two boys—students of slain teacher Victoria Soto—into his home, gave them toys and comforted them while he tried to reach their parents. He spent the days following the massacre telling his story to the swarming media that invaded the small Connecticut town in the wake of the shootings.
“I wanted to speak about the bravery of the children,” Rosen told Salon. “I guess I kind of opened myself up to this.”
A quick Web search for Rosen's name reveals some of what he's opened himself up to: Appearing online are photos of his home, his address and phone number, several fake YouTube accounts and plenty of conspiracy theories.
One post, entitled "Grieving Town Grandfather, or Bad 'Crisis Actor,'" reads in part:
Gene's oft repeated, and changing, story about that day, focuses totally on the kids and the sound of gunshots. Even though his eyes and ears should've taken in the whole scene, his story focuses completely on the kids and the guns.
Why? Well, if this was a false flag event designed to move political opinion on gun control, here in America, then you would get a lot more bang for your buck by talking about the innocent little children. That's what tugs on America's heart strings the most ... especially around Christmas time.
If the mentally deficient person who took "mommy's guns" and attacked the school didn't have access to fire arms, he could have done as much, if not more, damage using everyday household chemicals and carried a couple of 2 liter bottles of explosive into that school.
Many of the health services are under such budgetary constraints and Federal/State regulation that they don't have the funds to handle all the people they would like to handle. Where I live, because of budget cuts, our local Psychiatric facility are turning people away and releasing the ones they consider "not a threat to society at this time, providing they get proper supervision and take their meds" yet they can't afford sufficient staff to do the "proper supervision" . They budgets continue to get cut and are told "well, if they haven't hurt anybody yet, there's nothing we can do".
I read through the President 23 directives. Of a lot of them I asked "Why aren't we already doing that?" or "Aren't we already doing that?" . As I said before, I have fire arms Yet, I'm all for reasonable control. I'm also for not spending money on duplicate laws and spending that money on ways to help the Psychiatric/Psychology industry find and treat those who could possibly do as heinous a thing as what happened at Sandy Hook.
In a study of the mass shootings in the United States, over the last 40 years we have had 62. Most of the fire arms were obtained illegally. Criminals don't care about the laws. If they set out to do a crime, they aren't going to try and do it legally. Of the perpetrators of those shooting sprees, most of them were mentally ill and most of those displayed signs before setting out on their mission.
A very telling piece was a blog posted on "The Anarchist Soccer Mom" page (often referred to as "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother"). I suggest you read it to get an idea of why these people are out there and why help/control isn't available, even for a mother trying to keep her own son from being another Adam Lanza.
http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/th … kable.html
I could believe these goofy theories IF they had a more immediate benefit for a conspirators. But what/where is the benefit of any of these events?
It's all well and good to increase mental health funding, but let's don't kid ourselves. The folks who are doing the mass shootings are people who aren't getting help. It's fantastic to have great mental health services available, but to work, people have to use them. Considering that people who don't use them are the ones more likely to commit these types of crimes, you have a Catch 22 type situation.
Back on thread, I think it's just terrible what people have done to this nice old man. The Internet can be a curse in the hands of a bunch of idiots.
In regards to your comment about "up to 100 bullets": I have firearms. The magazine of my 9 mm Beretta holds nine. I can change a magazine in about 1 second. So, if I have 5 magazines, I have a firearm that can "hold" 45 bullets. The general public is not allowed "automatic weapons" (squeeze the trigger once to fire unlimited number of projectiles IE: Browning M2 Machine gun). We are, however, allowed to own "semi-automatic" weapons. Under the definition of "semi-automatic" even an old S&W .22 revolver is "semi-automatic.
Though firearms do facilitate the ability to create more damage in less time, if you look at the psychological profile of the people who have caused major violent acts you will notice they all seem to have a psychological defect. Yet, the government is being more about gun control while wanting to cut funding to the mental health support services.
Of the 30,470 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2010, 19,392 (63.6%) were suicide deaths, and 11,078 (36.4%) homicide deaths. Great Britain and Australia (where gun and ammo ownership is regulated) had less than 50.