It’s pretty hard to believe there are living, breathing people out there who don’t believe the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012 ever happened. This week, one of them was ordered to pay $450,000 to the father of one of the victims.
According to CBS news, retired University of Minnesota Duluth professor James Fetzer and Mike Palacek co-wrote the book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook in which they claimed the shooting never took place and was actually “an event staged by the federal government as part of an Obama administration effort to enact tighter gun restrictions.”
Leonard Pozner, the father of 6-year-old Noah who was killed in the shooting, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fetzer and Palacek, alleging that statements in their book claimed he had “fabricated copies of his son’s death certificate.”
“It causes people to believe that I lied about my son’s death, that my son didn’t die and that I’m somehow doing that for some other reasons,” Pozner said. “Mr. Fetzer has the right to believe Sandy Hook never happened. He has the right to express his ignorance.”
“This award, however, further illustrates the difference between the right of people like Mr. Fetzer to be wrong and the right of victims like myself and my child to be free from defamation, free from harassment and free from intentional infliction of terror,” he said.
As if Nobody Died at Sandy Hook wasn’t offensive enough to Pozner and the rest of his grieving family, he told the court that he had been “repeatedly harassed by people who don’t believe the Sandy Hook shooting occurred.” CBS reports that these people would express their disbelief in comments on photos of his son on a memorial website.
One comforting thing to come out of these horrors is that Fetzer has been ordered to pay $450,000 to Pozner. It was also reported that last year the publisher of the book apologised to him.
Sadly, nothing will be able to take away the emotional pain experienced by the friends and family of the victims of Sandy Hook. We can only hope the punishment of Fetzer and Palacek will deter other conspiracy theorists from attacking the families of these poor children, and in the future, gun control legislation will pass so these events don’t occur in the first place.