Five years ago, a man walked into an elementary school with a rifle and two handguns. This man, Adam Lanza, took the lives of twenty-seven people that day, including twenty students, six teachers, and his own mother earlier in the day. The country was in shock and mourning for the lives lost. Parents' lives have been changed forever. They kissed their children goodbye that morning, and several did not come home.

As the media scrambled to cover the disaster, people came out of the woodwork with their conspiracy theories. It always happens around major events. Someone always believes that it was a hoax, a setup, something orchestrated by the government or the Russians. But as the stories began to circulate about the children and teachers that lost their lives that day, how did people become so convinced it was a hoax?

Some theories are politically fueled. One major theory is the involvement of the US government in either fabricating the shooting or convincing the perpetrator to commit the mass murders. 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?"

Like Lewis, many believe that the government convinced Lanza to commit the murders to fuel the political debate about gun control. The mass shooting would have been 'good' for the gun control argument and has given another solid argument to gun control activists. Others claim that the event was completely fabricated to push gun control legislation, or otherwise persecute gun owners and survivalists.

Other countries also have a dog in this fight. Press TV, the official state media outlet of Iran, has released several announcements on the potential Israeli involvement in the issue. They interviewed an American, Veterans Today website owner Gordon Duff, who was among the first to claim that "Israeli Death Squads" were responsible for the shooting. Press TV claims that the attack was orchestrated in response to the supposed 'cooling' of US-Israel relations, especially under President Obama.

These absurd speculations are put together artfully. They're crafted carefully and based on ideas, not facts, so they cannot actually be disproven. They have swirled around the darker corners of the internet for years, but more recently have been pulled into the limelight yet again as famous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who runs the website InfoWars got on board the hoax-train.

In 2014, he claimed that no one actually died in Newtown, Connecticut in 2014, based on a misleading report made by the State Police. Backed suddenly by a well-known public figure, conspiracy theorists have now become encouraged and started to broadcast these ideas louder, and in a more public fashion.

Here, facing the five-year anniversay of the massacre, the parents and loved ones of the victims are already trying to balance their lives and their grief. In an incredibly unsensitive and cruel fashion, public figures like Alex Jones and Clyde Lewis spit in the face of these already devastated people by claiming that their loved ones weren't killed at all, or were simply pawns in a political advocacy scheme.