What Are The Conspiracy Theories Of The SHES Massacre

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty students and six staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School (SHES) in Newtown, Connecticut before committing suicide. Lanza’s horrific massacre evoked fear and grief across the United States, but it soon became the subject of controversy and debate. Numerous conspiracy theories of government involvement surround the tragedy as some people began to doubt and question the legitimacy of the mass shooting. Because of the growing distrust in the government in 2012, these conspiracy theories became pervasive in the media through the support of prominent “truthers” such as Alex Jones. Although most of the truthers’ arguments have been disproved, the conspiracy theories of the SHES massacre maintains

For this reason, conspiracy theories soon emerged in the aftermath as a rationalization behind the massacre. Conspiracy theorists, or “truthers,” argue that the mass shooting was a “false flag” operation conspired and orchestrated by the government in order to promote gun control. Some truthers insist that it was a staged hoax because the victims were either never killed or never existed, referencing the donation and memorial websites with timestamps that indicate they were created prior to the shooting. As the massacre garnered nationwide attention, some truthers began to speculate that the government also colluded with the media to exploit the shooting to elicit support for the gun-control agenda. They assert that the victims’ relatives who appeared on the news were crisis actors hired to dramatize and manipulate the tragedy. Moreover, some truthers emphasize the contradictions and inconsistencies in the news media which reported that multiple gunmen and different weapons were involved in the shooting. These conspiracy theories increasingly gained prevalence through social media and subsequently incited debate regarding the legitimacy of the SHES

In the years since the SHES massacre, many of the victims’ families and others involved in the shooting have received harassment. The father of the youngest victim, Leonard Pozner, and his family “received hate-filled calls and violent emails from people who say they know the shooting was a hoax” (Demick). Recently, several people have been arrested due to their harassment, such as a woman in Florida who was arrested with “making death threats against Pozner, with repeated phone calls to his home in which she muttered ethnic and racial slurs and profanities” (Demick). These instances of harassment contradict the statistic that belief in the conspiracy theories has decreased. In the most recent survey conducted by PublicMind in 2016, only eight percent of those surveyed agree that the government was involved in the SHES shooting (Cassino). Although statistics show a decline in belief in the conspiracy theories, the reports of truthers who act on their theories through harassment may indicate a considerable number of people who continue to believe the SHES shooting was