The murder of 20 school children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, 2012 was a watershed event.
If the country could tolerate a mentally ill man gunning down first graders as they crouched in a school bathroom 鈥� without doing anything to address gun violence 鈥� nothing would ever change. Even in a country inured to mass shootings, what could be worse?
For the families of the victims, however, there was a grim coda to the murders that is the subject of Elizabeth Williamson's disturbing and important new book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. Almost immediately, conspiracy theorists would insist that the killings hadn't really happened. That they were in fact a "false flag" operation designed to push a gun-control agenda. The afternoon the news broke, Alex Jones, the bombastic host of the radio show The Alex Jones Show and the website Info Wars, said "My gut is, with the timing and everything that happened, this is