We’re watching a press conference held by two lawyers who represent the extended family of the suspected San Bernardino massacre attackers. That is, to put it mildly, a pretty challenging position to be in. But, I must say, they are doing about as badly at it as you can possibly imagine. As we noted, one of the two, David Chesley, earlier today floated the idea that not only were we not getting the full story about this attack (certainly a possibility and a reasonable question to ask) but that the Sandy Hook massacre may have been a false flag hoax. That claim certainly doesn’t build a lot of confidence.
In the course of this news conference, Chesley has falsely claimed that President Obama uses every mass shooting to call for the banning of all guns in the United States. He’s also noted that often times gun owners (including himself) will stock up on thousands of rounds of ammunition to get a better price (again, probably true at least sometimes). But he also added that this is because the DHS is stockpiling ammunition and making it impossible to law abiding gun owners to buy ammo. That’s getting into sort of weird territory.
He also said we need to defend the Second Amendment. Again, no less than President Obama says he believes the the Second Amendment protects a personal right to bear arms. But when you’re trying to explain some context to an attack, that the family knew nothing about it and condemns it, I’m not sure explaining why the couple might have had an innocent reason to stockpiling ammunition is helpful when no one seems to be questioning that they used a lot of the ammunition to massacre dozens of people.
Again, I think a lot of this is just a lawyer who doesn’t have a lot of experience in this kind of extremely high profile case. Some of things he said aren’t really wrong so much as not terribly relevant or helpful to his clients. Other points sound like he’s a regular on the Alex Jones show. Just weird stuff.
