The United States of America is the leading country in mass shootings throughout the world. In 2017 alone, between January 1 and November 7, there were 307 mass shootings. The United States completely surpasses every other country's statistics. The United States shooting rates are 5 times higher than the second leading country. Recently in the news, three families of shooting victims are suing a conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, for defamation after he claimed that Sandy Hook was a fake shooting. The traumatic massacre took place in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, taking the lives of 26 people, 20 of which were children.

Jones stated his reasoning for claiming that the tragedy was a fraud was that the federal government hired actors and staged the entire scene. He also believes that the parents of the deceased children are involved and that they are covering up the deaths of their own children. While many people think this is a sadistic claim, Jones' thought pattern supports nearly every common conspiracy theory for massacres taken place in the U.S. Many people, especially on social media, believe that the government hires "crisis actors" to appear at these "massacres" so thaat people will believe someone is actually suffering from this event. This is all to supposedly draw attention away from whatever the government is doing at the time. Some have allegedly caught multiple crisis actors in their interviews on television.

The woman above who was originally thought to be James Foley's (U.S. journalist that was beheaded in Syria back in 2014) mother was apparently discovered to be crisis actor Adriana Victoria Munoz. She is not only "James Foley's mother," but was also a witness at the 2013 Boston Bombing and later at the Watertown shootout. She was even a "friend" of the mass shooter's mother in the Sandy Hook massacre (which could be more evidence that would support Alex Jones' claim).

Munoz was not the only person accused of being a crisis actor. The newly fame acquired gun-control activist David Hogg, was another crisis actor exposed. Most of us have heard of the recent tragedy of the Parkland shooting that took place in February of this year. Hogg was one of the few students interviewed after the tragedy and claimed to be a bystander during the event. When news of this hit social media, it took a weird and confusing turn. Interviews started surfacing of him claiming that he was not at school in the morning until he grabbed his camera and rode there for evidence. Many people started claiming that David Hogg was not actually a resident of Florida or even a student at Stoneman Douglas High School. He was accused of living in California and not being a current student at all.

This very mysterious social media post started putting everyone into a conspiracy theory frenzy. If Hogg's was living in California and graduated in 2015, how was he a student at the Parkland shooting? Does his dream of being a CNN actor proove that he was originally hired as one?

Although I do believe conspiracy theories are interesting, I feel that it is unfair to accuse parents of lying about the death of their own children and reopening the wounds from such a traumatic nightmare. But theories such as David Hogg get me thinking if staged massacres do exist. What are your thoughts?