The incomprehensible tragedy turned the national conversation once again to gun control. On the morning of December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School and, in the space of five minutes, shot to death 20 first-grade children and six educators before turning the gun on himself. We now know the networkвЂ™s 1st and foremost goal From this point forward, are you going to make your decisions out of fear or out of love? I donвЂ™t always succeed, but I try like hell to not have my decisions come out of fear.вЂќ But itвЂ™s hard to imagine WellesвЂ™s tale of extraterrestrial invaders registering even a retweet in todayвЂ™s media landscape, where conspiracy theories, fake news, and intentional deceptions are churned out daily by everyone from the White House on down and spread in split seconds across tens of millions of magic screens.Дavid Wheeler, who lost a child in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre and has been accused by Second Amendment advocate and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars, among others, of falsifying his childвЂ™s murder as part of a campaign to undermine gun rights, had this to say: вЂњIt has been incredibly painful to have to live through this, to have to face this kind of thing for the offense of speaking publicly, but it comes back to something I landed on days after. ICYMI: NY journalist handcuffed to railing over his headДЄmericans are as prone to fear and manipulation now as they were in 1938. We wanted people to understand that they shouldnвЂ™t take any opinion pre-digested, and they shouldnвЂ™t swallow everything that came through the tap, whether it was radio or not.вЂќ вЂњWe were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowedвЂ‰.вЂ‰.вЂ‰.вЂ‰so in a way, our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. вЂњn fact, we werenвЂ™t as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast,вЂќ Welles said in a 1955 BBC interview. The numbers actually duped by his Martian tale have since been disputed by a counter-narrative suggesting that American newspapers hyped the hysteria with fake news reports of panic in an effort to prove that radio, increasingly competitive with print, was an untrustworthy new medium. His brilliantly spun 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds created such havoc it even surprised Welles.

Orson Welles proved that Americans could be convinced of anything, even a story as preposterous as armed Martians invading New Jersey.

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