Based on hundreds of hours of interviews and exclusive sources and access, Sandy Hook tells the story ofa school shootingand its aftermath, when a group of parents fought to rescuethe truth of what happenedto their childrenfrom a frenzy of online denial and conspiracizing.
On December 14, 2012, twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, including twenty children barely older than toddlers, were shot and killed. It felt like a line in the sand, on gun violence and safety. Instead, ten years on, Sandy Hook has become a foundational story, and a symbol- of howfalseconspiracynarratives havegained traction in our world.
From a tragedyalmost too terrible to fathom,themass shootingat Sandy Hookemerged asan event somepeopletruly believe never occurred, or was staged by thefederalgovernment as apretext for seizing Americans' firearms.In the wake of the tragedy,relativesof the victimshave been accosted on the street or at events honoring their loved ones.Some have beenstalked and forcedinto hiding.Someonefired a guninto the home of one parent.Familieswereharassed online, challengedtoprove the very existence ofthose theylost.
At the center of conspiracy theorists' crusade is Alex Jones's Infowars, where hoaxersairednoxious theories andraisedmoney for their quest to "prove" that the shooting didn't happen.Emboldened by online anonymity,the conspiracists'questions grew into suspicion, suspicion into demands for proof, unanswered demands into rage.This pattern of denial and attack would come to characterize some Americans' response to every major event, from mass shootings to the 2020 presidential election, in which the false belief that the election was stolen prompted the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The Sandy Hook families, their experiences as diverse as their numbers,refused to accept this. This is the story of their battle, led by the father of the youngest victim, to preserve their loved ones' legacieseven in the face of threats to their own lives.
Through exhaustive reporting, narrative storytelling, and intimate portraits, Sandy Hook will be the definitive book on one of the most shocking cultural ruptures of the internet age.
