The tragic Sandy Hook Elementary shooting: the perpetrators of the lies and lies in the media and political world, and the victims of the conspiracy theories themselves

Even the young survivors of the Sandy Hook tragedy were not spared the cruelty of these conspiracy theories. Recently, I met with a college student who survived the shooting and has been harassed for years by people who believe some survivors are the murdered children, living out their lives under assumed identities.

Robbie Parker, a father whose public statement after his daughter’s death was mocked by Alex Jones repeatedly, testified in the conspiracy theorist’s recent Connecticut trial about a run-in with a man on the other side of the country who followed him through city streets, yelling that his daughter’s murder had been a hoax.

Another Sandy Hook father, Lenny Pozner, whose civil case against Jones in Texas is still pending, is among the relatives who has faced death threats. A Florida woman was sentenced to five months in federal prison for making threatening calls and emails to Esther Pozner.

Mass shootings, though statistically rare, have become more common in the US since Sandy Hook – but national politicians have not done nearly enough to address them.

The initial news coverage for the shooting was rife with errors, and they were blamed for a coverup by conspiracy theorists. Some videos and blogs that spliced together conflicting news reports and critiqued media appearances by victims’ relatives went viral, gaining enormous reach thanks to social media algorithms designed to reward controversial content without regard to its veracity.

Though the implications were horrendous, some of the videos were widely shared, including by establishment figures in media and politics – an indication of how politicians would increasingly boost misinformation in the years to come. By the one-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, one popular conspiracy video on YouTube had been viewed more than 10 million times.

Ordinary Americans have been targeted far beyond crimes and tragedies. Conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic and the safety of vaccines led to the harassment of nurses and other hospital workers. Mainstream politicians and others push false claims of fraud in the 2020 election to target election workers.

We have also seen a direct connection between conspiracy theories and violence. The mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was motivated by the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory and a disinformation campaign shouted from the White House.

outrageous false beliefs no longer disqualify them for national politicians, they have become a litmus test in some Republican contests. One of the newly re-elected members of the US Congress is a woman and she has stirred doubts about the Sandy Hook and school shooting tragedies by attacking a teenage survivor.

Conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns have become a tool regularly wielded in political disputes, including in the debate over guns. President Biden’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives – an important Justice Department agency to keep Americans safe that has been without a permanent head since 2015 – was undone last year in part by a campaign of nasty memes and disinformation about the nominee and his family.

The Times published a Page 1 article in 1995 that warned of the dangers of “modern-day Dodge City scenarios” in which fender-bender accidents could escalate into bloodshed among gun-toting motorists. False alarm, for the most part. Concealed-carry permits didn’t turn communities into Dodge, because those who went through the permit process were often middle-aged adults with no criminal history and pretty good self-control. It is a problem if the Supreme Court encourages gun proliferation and if some states now issue permits to almost everyone, but the court still allows some room for regulation.

Last year’s bipartisan gun safety bill – which garnered the support of 14 Republicans in the House and 15 in the Senate – represented the most significant new federal legislation to address gun violence since the expired 10-year assault weapons ban of 1994. But it failed to ban any weapons and fell far short of what Biden and his party had advocated for – and what polls show Americans want to see.

A recent survey found that 29% of US adults think there would be less crime if more people owned guns. According to multiple studies, people with easy access to firearms are more likely to have gun-related deaths.

According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, America reached the grim number by the first of March, setting a new record.

Gun violence activism has become a central plank of Democratic politics, with President Joe Biden repeatedly lamenting Congress’ inability to pass “common sense” measures after multiple mass shootings this year.

There are real solutions that can be used now, including banning the sale of assault weapons and high capacity magazines, but only if our elected officials act to implement them.

There are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans according to a survey. No other nation has more civilian guns than people. And about 44% of US adults live in a household with a gun, and about one-third own one personally, according to a November 2020 Gallup survey.

“For gun violence survivors, this is an incredibly painful milestone to mark, and it arrives earlier and earlier each year,” said Liz Dunning, a spokesperson for Brady whose mother was shot and killed while answering the door of her home in 2003. “But survivors are increasingly taking action, and demanding our lawmakers stand up to the corporate gun industry and take comprehensive steps to reduce the recent influx of mass shootings.”

He calls his efforts to end gun violence the “mass shooting generation,” a term he uses to refer to people who grew up in the US as part of that generation.

“We’ve seen these things and been wondering our whole lives as young people, in high school, middle school and elementary school, why? Why is this happening? Why have we not fixed this? And now we’re at a place where we can vote and we can run, and we’re going to do it,” Frost said when he won the Democratic nomination.

The psychosocial effects of guns on suicides and homicides: an analysis by Johns Hopkins University in the US from 2019 to 2021

Most of the public (66%) favored stricter gun laws, a July 2022 CNN poll found, with more than 4 in 10 saying that recently enacted gun legislation didn’t go far enough to change things.

The mental health crisis in the US is cited by many Republicans to be the reason for the country’s gun violence problem.

Mental health challenges grew throughout the pandemic and violence increased, but an analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that guns made those incidences significantly more deadly. Between 2019 and 2021, all of the increase in suicides and most of the increase in homicides was from gun-related incidences. The gun suicide rate increased 10% while the non-gun suicide rate decreased.