Relatives of victims of gun violence and gun violence prevention advocates holding up photos of victims during a press conference to honor the second anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, at the US Capitol, Washington, D.C., Dec. 10, 2014. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — The grandmother of the 6-year-old Jewish boy who was killed in the mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, criticized opponents of gun control legislation in a Washington Post Op-Ed on the event’s third anniversary.
“Guns don’t kill; people do. Yes, that’s true. An open society can never protect itself completely from evil or insanity,” Marie-Claude Duytshaever, grandmother of Noah Pozner, wrote in the Washington Post on Monday. “But it can start by preventing the distribution of the powerful weapons and ammunition that have been used to kill our grandson and so many other innocents.”
Duytshaever singled out and slammed Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, an adamant defender of the uninhibited right to bear arms.
“A couple of months ago … Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, wrote that he had never seen a body with bullet holes that was more devastating ‘than taking the right to arm ourselves away,’” she wrote. “Presumably Carson never saw one of his kids or grandkids bullet-ridden and forever stilled.”
Noah’s parents, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, also spoke out Thursday in advance of the anniversary of the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in an Op-Ed in the Florida Sun-Sentinel. The couple bashed a Florida Atlantic university professor, James Tracy, who has said that President Barack Obama staged the Newtown shooting to further his gun control agenda.
“Tracy has enjoyed tremendous success from this exposure and has since leveraged it into a popular Internet blog and radio program,” the Pozners wrote in the newspaper. “Worse yet, it has elevated his status and fame among the degenerates that revel in the pleasure of sadistically torturing victims’ families.”
The couple also said that Tracy caused them significant “pain and anguish” by harassing them with requests to prove that they were Noah’s biological parents and the “rightful owner of his photographic image.”
“Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the ‘unfulfilled request’ was ‘noteworthy’ because we had used copyright claims to ‘thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event,’” the Pozners wrote.
The couple noted that Tracy’s comments were supported by his “frequent collaborator” James Fetzer, a known Holocaust denier.
Noah Pozner was one of the 20 children and six adult staffers killed by a lone gunman — Adam Lanza, 20 — on Dec. 14, 2012 in the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or elementary school in U.S. history.
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