Did the July 4th Shooting at Highland Park Really Take Place?

Ready? Here comes the single craziest statement that anyone has ever made about gun violence in the United States.

And who made it? None other than Marjorie Taylor Greene who said in a podcast that the recent mass shootings in Highland Park on July 4th were ‘staged.’

Why was the shooting which killed seven people and injured dozens more nothing other than a phony event? Because it would galvanize public opinion and push Republicans to support gun control.

That’s what she said. She really did. Which is why we have the 1st Amendment in this country so that people like MJT can get away with saying such loony, hurtful things.

Except maybe they can’t, if it turns out that what they said really did result in someone else getting hurt. After all, the Constitution doesn’t protect someone who stands up and yells ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?

It just so happens that one of America’s most notorious fire-throwers, Alex Jones of Infowars, will be shortly going on trial both in Texas and Connecticut for having promoted the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, a non-stop series of talking points on his show which resulted in harassments and death threats suffered by the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook.

Jones has been ducking this one for years, and finally had to admit that his conspiracy theories about what happened at the Newtown elementary school were concocted out of whole cloth and that he was suffering from mental illness at the time he made those claims up. Now he’s defending himself against the damages suffered by the parents of dead Sandy Hook children by claiming that he has the ‘right’ to say anything he wants.

The judges both in Texas and Connecticut disagree. It should be noted that the Connecticut judge, Barbara Bellis, also heard the original lawsuit against Remington whose gun was used in the massacre at Sandy Hook. In that case, she found that Remington’s argument that they weren’t liable for injuries at the school was strong enough to move the case into Federal court where Remington lost.

That decision paved the way for Remington to make a settlement with the plaintiffs for $73 million. Obviously, Jones thinks he…