Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victim
.....There is no easy
explanation, either, to find in Richman’s death. There are two contexts,
however, that have been hard to ignore. The first is that the previous week two
of the teenage survivors of the Parkland
school shooting in Florida had also taken their own lives. Richman, in
his public statements over the years, had often noted how each time there was a
new tragedy, a new mass shooting – and there were so very many – he and
Jennifer “would just sit and bawl”.
Like many Americans,
he believed that Sandy Hook would be a turning point for the nation and its gun
laws. “When will it be enough?” he said in an interview in 2018. “I feel like
we’re letting it happen. That there are things that could be done, that aren’t
being done.” The other, related, context in which Richman’s death asks to be
viewed is the unspeakable way in which the burden of grief that the Newtown parents
have borne was added to by those who sought to exploit the tragedy.
In the eyes of the
internet Sandy Hook has become synonymous with the most macabre and vicious
case study in conspiracy theory. From the day after the shooting the inhuman
suggestions that the murders had been “staged” by the American “deep state” or
“the anti-gun lobby”, that the grieving parents were “crisis actors”, and that
their children had not been murdered at all, has been fuelled and spread across
social media.
It is impossible to
comprehend the effect that those accusations might have on families like
Richman’s. Another Newtown father, Lenny Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah
was killed alongside Avielle, has made it his mission to try to clear the internet of the
conspiracies. As a result he had been hounded for years with death threats that
have forced him to move house eight times for his own safety. Last Tuesday, in
response to the news of Richman’s death, Pozner tweeted a quote from Dr David
Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement in
Los Angeles. “The loss of the assumptive world, on top of the actual trauma,
can set off a cascade of events …”... read more:
