Grandma of Newtown Victim Noah Pozner Demands Gun Control

Image by Getty Images
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.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
- 2
News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
- 3
Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
- 4
Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Explainer: What the Israeli occupation of Gaza would mean for Israelis and Palestinians
-
Yiddish טשיקאַוועסן: אונגערישע אויסשטעלונג ווײַזט רמזים פֿון הילצערנער שיל פֿון 18טן י״הTidbits: Exhibit displays remnants of 18th century wooden synagogue
אינעם 18טן יאָרהונדערט איז די קהילה אין נאַזנאַ געווען די צווייט גרעסטע אין גאַנץ טראַנסילוואַניע.
-
News Is the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism the new Red Scare?
-
Opinion Trump’s cuts are a war on Jewish literature, thought and history itself
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.