What To Know Today
Sandy Hook parents decry “living hell” they say Alex Jones put them through over lies. In the final day of testimony in the first of three defamation damages trials against the far-right conspiracy theorist, parents of a boy killed during the 2012 shooting described the trauma, harassment, and fear they’ve felt since Jones repeatedly called the shooting a hoax. “It seems so incredible to me that we have to do this — that we have to implore you, to punish you — to get you to stop lying,” Scarlett Lewis told Jones. “Truth is what we base our reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society.” The often intense day included the judge chastising Jones for repeatedly lying under oath.
House Committee on Oversight and Reform subpoenas Smith & Wesson. Representative Carolyn Maloney, the committee’s chair, sent a letter to Smith & Wesson President and CEO Mark P. Smith asking for documents related to the company’s production and sales of AR-15-style rifles and internal communications that address recent mass shootings. The letter says that Smith’s company refused to voluntarily provide information during the committee’s investigation into gunmakers. And several days beforehand, Smith canceled scheduled testimony before the committee in a hearing that included the CEOs of other gunmakers.
More lawsuits target a gun company over a weapon used in a mass shooting. Family members of people wounded or killed in the 2019 shooting at a garlic festival in California filed suit against manufacturer Century International Arms and Romanian gun producer ROMARM, alleging that the companies “knowingly breached the duty to exercise the highest degree of reasonable care in preventing the diversion of firearms to dangerous actors.” The perpetrator legally acquired his rifle in Nevada before taking it to California, where its possession and sale was banned. The suit is part of an increasing number that attempt to target gun companies by evading the federal shield that protects gunmakers from many suits. Related: A lawsuit against Glock from a victim of the April subway shooting in New York City will likely be held pending a federal appeals court decision on a gun industry challenge to New York’s law allowing suits against gun companies based on so-called public nuisance violations.
Mass shooting in D.C. that left six victims caps a violent period. On Monday, a man opened fire into a large crowd outside an apartment complex in Northeast D.C., leaving one person dead and five others wounded. It was one of at least three dozen incidents in which people were hit by gunfire in the city in a six-day period between last Wednesday and Monday, leaving six people dead. A mother who lived at the apartment complex told The Washington Post that she was hoping to move out of her neighborhood: “Our kids can’t play, we can’t go to the store. We fear every time we walk. They have just been randomly shooting in broad daylight, nighttime.”
Mark McCloskey, who pointed a gun at Black Lives Matter protesters, loses GOP Senate bid. The candidate in the Senate Republican primary in Missouri came in a distant fifth with 3 percent of the vote. Eric Greitens — the former governor who was accused of abuse by his ex-wife and produced an ad of himself holding a shotgun and threatening to hunt so-called Republicans in Name Only — finished third with 19 percent.
Data Point
46 — the number of friends muralist Kyle Holbrook says he’s lost to gun violence. Holbrook, who has spearheaded anti-gun violence murals in numerous cities including Baltimore, Chicago, and his native Pittsburgh, recently added a new one — “Peace — in Washington, D.C. “A mural by itself is not going to stop gun violence,” he said. “It brings the issue to the forefront of peoples’ minds.” [NBC4 Washington]
