Teagan Okutman's Blog

The Sandy Hook shooting happened in Newton, Connecticut on December 14^th, 2012 when 20 year old Adam Lanza entered the elementary school and shot and killed 20 children and 6 faculty members. The gunman had also killed his mother before heading to the school, bringing the total casualties to 27.

After the tragedy, many people were calling for gun control reform in the United States, while conspiracists called it a hoax. A Florida Professor, James Tracy, who was an associate professor at the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic, started questioning if the shooting really happened. He was then brought onto a podcast called Infowars, run by famous conspiracist Adam Jones, to debate this claim. This brought the conspiracy to the public eye, and Jones became known to be the main perpetrator of this hoax where he spread the claim that it was staged by the government to push gun reform and that they used crisis actors. Jones was later sued for defamation for these claims and was found liable for damages in three lawsuits brought on by the parents of two of the victims from the shooting. Tracy also lost his job at the university, and attempted to sue the school over his first amendment right being impeded, but this was ultimately rejected by the courts.

Some of the tactics used by conspiracists included emotional language, edited footage, misrepresented pictures, and selective quotes that were taken out of context. The use of emotional language and misrepresentation of evidence is a big way propaganda like this, gets it’s influence over the general public. With such a high tension situation with high emotions, people are easily swayed to believe certain viewpoints, especially if all of the facts are not out yet. The fact that Jones used a professor as a testimonial could also be a way that he propagandized this tragedy to make his audience believe the conspiracy

While there is much proof to show the shooting did happen, including law enforcement documentation, public records, verifiable sources of reporters that were there as it unfolded, and court decisions, the damage from the conspiracies had already been done. The families of many of the victims faced harassment and death threats from Jone’s Infowars podcast followers. Even after these rulings, Jone’s lawyers deny the allegations, claiming his comments were protected by the first amendment.

Since this tragedy is also so hard for many to process, this could be why some people are still untrusting the truth. It’s easier for some to believe that this is a hoax to ease their mind that something so terrible could ever happen in their country, or to them. Conspiracists also are prone to not trusting authority in the first place, especially when it comes to the government, so anything that could affirm their already established belief would be welcomed with open arms and without a second thought. There are many people online who try to fight against this conspiracy propaganda and try to inform people on the facts and the realities of the tragedy. The Violence Prevention Hotline has a lot of information on the shooting and talks about what happened and why some people were lead astray from the facts. While the general consensus is that the shooting did in fact happen, this planted distrust of tragedies is many people’s minds, and school shootings that have happened since this one have had similar conspiracies created surrounding them.