Mr. Trump, my mother’s murder wasn’t a hoax
This Thanksgiving, I sat at a dinner table with an empty seat. It’s the very seat where my mother, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, should be. Smiling, laughing and enjoying a holiday meal with her daughters and grandchildren. Instead, my mom wasn’t there because nearly four years ago, she was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, along with five of her colleagues and 20 firstgraders.
My heart — and my dinner table — reflect the hole in my life that will never be repaired. And while I’ve chosen a path of gun safety advocacy that not everyone agrees with, some opponents of gun violence prevention follow a different, darker path. A fringe movement of “Sandy Hook truthers” promotes conspiracy theories that the shooting never took place.
The most prominent popularizer of the hoax theory is the radio and Web personality Alex Jones. He’s the kind of person you’d expect to be confined to the darkest echo chambers of the Web. Yet, Jones has been bolstered by the very man who has proclaimed he’ll make America great again: President-elect Donald Trump.
Even after an election that exposed deep divisions in our country, surely we can all agree on this: The mass shooting at Sandy Hook happened. Any preposterous ideas to the contrary cannot be allowed to seep into our country’s mainstream discourse. Yet Donald Trump has promised to again appear on Jones’ program, praising Alex Jones’ “amazing ” reputation.
I believe that a wide range of opinions can be accommodated in our democracy. And I know that the vast majority of Americans don’t believe Jones. Only a few extremists consider my mother’s death a fiction.
But part of what allows the president-elect to entertain chatting with Jones is the indifference of decent people to stand up and condemn the thinking of those like Jones in the first place.
We cannot shrug our shoulders and chalk it up to “Trump being Trump” yet do nothing about it. We may approach the issue of gun violence in America differently, but we must all realize that claiming mass shootings are elaborate, government-manufactured hoaxes is deeply hateful and hurtful to those of us living this terrible truth.
President-elect Trump will face the same kinds of tragedies President Obama has lived through.
He’ll need to visit with the broken-hearted, and he’ll need to prove he’s a president who can represent us all.
A man who ran on a campaign to “improve our country” simply cannot embrace a man whose preposterous theories are antithetical to our shared values.
I’ve faced the hard truth of the murder of my mother, and it’s time for Trump to face one of his own. U.S. presidents are held to higher standards than reality television stars. He must denounce Jones and the hateful fictions that he spews.
Erica Lafferty, whose mother was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, is partnerships manager at Everytown for Gun Safety.