United States government involvement Some conspiracy theorists claim that the shooting was a hoax and a
false flag operation staged by the United States government. Others say the attack is being used by politicians to push through new
gun control legislation, or to otherwise persecute gun owners. Talk show host Clyde Lewis wrote: "Don't you find it at all interesting that Adam Lanza, the alleged shooter at Sandy Hook, woke up one day and decided to shoot up a school and kill children at about the same time that Barack Obama told the U.N. that he would sign the small arms treaty?" According to
Live Science, "No one, regardless of what side of the gun control issue they are on, can deny that guns played a key role in the Sandy Hook killings. So the conspiracy theorists must instead challenge the claim that the attack even occurred. They believe it's all a hoax to scare people into supporting more gun control and a step toward an outright repeal of the
Second Amendment." They also found that the vast majority of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to support the concept that Sandy Hook was a hoax is contradictory.
Snopes.com also debunked several claims of alleged United States government involvement in the shootings.
Claims broadcast by Iranian television Press TV, the official
state media outlet of
Iran, has promoted various
antisemitic conspiracy theories blaming "
Israeli death squads" for the shooting. Other conspiracy theorists have claimed that as many as four shooters were present. According to these theories, Lanza's father was supposed to testify before the
Senate Banking Committee with information about the
Libor scandal. However, no such hearings were scheduled. Similar claims had been made about the father of
James Holmes, the convicted perpetrator of the
2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting.
Timestamps of memorial sites Conspiracy theories have claimed that various timestamps for creation dates,
whois records, and
Google caches of various memorial websites, fundraising sites, and
Facebook were created before or immediately after the date and time of the shooting and are therefore "evidence" of a conspiracy or cover up. However, timestamps are frequently incorrect, particularly on search engines. Some timestamps are initially created and assigned to URLs that are then repurposed, meaning that a URL linked to a current event can have a much older date. This claim is false and misrepresents the FBI report. In reality, because the
Connecticut State Police was the lead investigator after the attack, the Sandy Hook victims were included in Connecticut's statewide records (under "State Police Misc.") rather than under the Newtown statistics. In November 2016, Erica L. Lafferty, daughter of Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, the school principal who was shot and killed at Sandy Hook School, wrote open letters to then-
President-elect Donald Trump (published in
Medium and
USA Today), calling upon him to denounce Jones, after Trump had appeared on
InfoWars during his presidential campaign and lavished praise on its presenter, saying that the conspiracy theorist had an "amazing" reputation and pledging not to let him down. Trump did not respond to the letter. The trial was expected to be scheduled by the end of 2020. On May 23, 2018, six families of victims of the shooting, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the attack, filed a defamation lawsuit in Bridgeport Superior Court in Connecticut against Jones for his role in spreading conspiracy theories about the shooting. In a deposition in the last week of March 2019, Jones acknowledged the deaths were real, stating he had "almost like a form of psychosis", where he "basically thought everything was staged." By 2021, Jones did not provide information to support his claims, defaulting in favor of the plaintiffs.
James Tracy James Tracy, a former professor at
Florida Atlantic University (FAU) who taught a course on conspiracy theories, has suggested the shooting either did not actually occur or occurred very differently than accounted in mainstream reports, claiming political motives for the coverup. FAU president
Mary Jane Saunders issued a statement that Tracy's views were "not shared by" the university. In response to his comments, the university opened an investigation of Tracy, who had
tenure. In December 2015, after the family of
Noah Pozner—one of the children murdered at Sandy Hook—claimed that Tracy had harassed them, FAU moved to fire Tracy. Chan Lowe of the
Sun-Sentinel speculated that the comments were a
publicity stunt by Tracy. Tracy later declined an appearance on
CNN with
Anderson Cooper, suggesting that Cooper wanted to bring him and his family members harm by identifying him in a prior broadcast. The university fired Tracy on January 5, 2016, citing his refusal to file required paperwork related to outside employment for several years.
James Fetzer In 2016,
James Fetzer and Mike Palacek published the book
Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, which claimed that the event was a classified
Federal Emergency Management Agency drill involving federal and local law enforcement and the media, and that the government had created false death certificates to claim there were victims. Fetzer stated that the parents displayed old photos of their real children and made up new names for the photo subjects, thereby creating non-existent younger siblings. Fetzer also claimed that several of these older-age real children, who were unnamed and billed as "Newtown's Children," sang "
America the Beautiful" at the
2013 Super Bowl with
Jennifer Hudson, arguing there were strong facial similarities with the victims.
Lenny Pozner, father of victim Noah Pozner, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fetzer and Palacek. Pozner won a summary judgement from the court in June 2019. The book's publisher, Moon Rock Books, apologized to the Pozner family and agreed to take the book out of circulation at the end of June. On October 16, 2019, a jury awarded Leonard Pozner $450,000 for defamation by James Fetzer. Fetzer announced his intention to appeal against the decision. A video similarly questioning official accounts of the shooting received several million views on
YouTube within a week of its posting,
Other conspiracy theorists and claims Other sources have continued to claim that the entire event was a hoax. On September 12, 2014, during a political debate,
Colorado Republican Party candidate Tom Ready (who was running for
Pueblo County Commission) was accused by his opponent,
Sal Pace, of posting an article on his
Facebook page claiming the Sandy Hook shootings "never happened". Ready responded: "Well, there is some question of whether it happened, Sal." This was followed by more statements of the same tenor, prompting outraged yells from the audience. After allegedly receiving a death threat the next day, Ready reportedly apologized for his remarks. Other conspiracy theorists have tried to connect the shooting to references in popular culture. Prison Planet, a website owned by British conspiracy theorist
Paul Joseph Watson, mentioned that Newtown-based author
Suzanne Collins wrote
The Hunger Games books, in which 23 children are "ritualistically" killed, while 20 children were killed in the shooting. Others pointed out that "Sandy Hook" can be seen on a map of
Gotham City in the 2012 Batman film
The Dark Knight Rises—the New Jersey peninsula just south of
New York Harbor is named
Sandy Hook. ==Analysis==