Among all of the suggested research topics, I find the mass shooting at Sandy Hook to be uniquely relevant amid the baffling social divide in the United States right now. This horrific and seemingly gateway event took place back in 2012, as teenager Adam Lanza chose to murder his mother before killing another 26 others at an elementary school. Aside from stunning the country, controversies around the event came to light as influencers called the massacre a hoax and a planned attack. For example, the event is still timely as Alex Jones was recently ordered to pay 10s of millions in regard to his wrongful conspiracy statements following the massacre years back. “A Texas jury ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Friday to pay the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting $45.2 million in punitive damages for spreading the lie that they helped stage the massacre”. Others claim the massacre was intended to begin a major shift in sentiment regarding school safety in America and ultimately serve as a catalyst in gun control activism. Though there are many other mass shootings that occurred this year and in general over the course of the last few years Sandy Hook was one that really stood out to me because of the major impact it had on so many people’s lives.

While many persuasion tactics have been utilized to influence hundreds of millions of media consumers, it seems as though disproportionate and misleading facts and figures create the most issues as they confuse and spread quickly. Influencers all too often develop communities of likeminded individuals to further progress vocalizing issues, which creates a snowball effect while also artificially amplifying problems through media. The media can sometimes spin things to make them seem larger and more prominent than what is really going on in real life, however, this is something that social media had to make sure was very raw as well as real when sharing the stories that surround the problem. This is important for people to know as well as fully understand the issue of what went on, so people are able to try and get their questions answered even if the situation has nothing to do with them.

This issue is far from resolved. With several hundred mass shootings taking place in the US just this year, many similar to that of Sandy Hook, this country’s gun violence is out of control and scary. While the media tells us that this general view accepts these shootings as legitimate and acts of terror, many still feel otherwise, having ideas that a deeply rooted plan is in place to sway a nation to give up their guns. As the news networks do have incredible control, most will agree that this shooting has been widely accepted as a random act of terror. However, the media’s portrayal of the event was taken too far and continues to damage the nation until today.