It's been a little over a month since Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook elementary school and murdered dozens of innocent children in cold blood. Since then, the gun control debate has escalated to a fever pitch in Washington DC and in communities around the country. But there has been even more disturbing conversations happening in the wake of Sandy Hook: conspiracy theorists who claim that the shootings never happened, or that Adam Lanza wasn't responsible the only shooter, or that the whole thing was orchestrated by the government as a grab for guns. On Wednesday night, Glenn hosted a special show dedicated to debunking these theories because people are detaching from the truth and ignoring the real problems happening in the country.
TheBlaze's Billy Hallowell researched the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and detailed the facts in an investigative report. Read it HERE.
In the opening monologue, Glenn walked through the various theories that have made their way across the darker corners of the internet. Among the claims out there are that there were multiple shooters, the guns were planted by someone, and the Chief Medical Examiner was "in on it". What's the truth? Glenn walked through the facts piece by piece.
Perhaps the most disturbing Sandy Hook conspiracy theories center around the families of the victims. They claim that the parents seemed too happy when in interviews or press conferences. As Glenn pointed out, their happy expressions often came when talking about the joyful lives their children led, not the tragedy itself. One theory even claims that victim Emilie Parker was photographed with President Obama days after the incident, when in reality it was Parker's cousin and sister who were in the photograph.
Later in the show, Glenn invited Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald and TheBlaze's Billy Hallowell to discuss the growth and viral spread of conspiracy theories in the modern age. Because of the internet, videos like the ones purporting unfounded theories are able to spread faster than ever. What are people who are trying to differentiate between healthy speculation and skepticism supposed to do to avoid getting sucked into the baseless stories? The three discuss in the video below: