Doubting Dalton
Students push back as conspiracy theorists, internet trolls take aim after classroom gun incident
Just a few hours after hiding from what was thought to be a school shooter, David Garcia and his classmates at Dalton (Ga.) High School found themselves on the front lines of a battle with conspiracy theorists and online “trolls” who claimed the scare was a hoax.
He was in the school cafeteria eating lunch with about 300 classmates around noon when he first noticed something was wrong. He heard screams, then someone yelled “Code red!” and everyone started running.
The chaos began when a social studies teacher at the school, Jesse Randal Davidson, allegedly barricaded himself in a classroom and fired a shot through a window with a revolver, prompting a school lockdown. Garcia hid in a locker room with dozens of other students until members of law enforcement came to clear them out once Davidson was taken into custody.
No one was shot, but Garcia, like several other Dalton students, took a cue from the survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting and tweeted about the terror he felt during the lockdown and his desire to see gun control policies enacted.
“I’m a dalton high school student and that s —— was scary as hell. Anyone who says these things are staged is an idiot. Arming teachers is not a good idea. I was at lunch w ab 300 other students that was horrible,” he tweeted just hours after the shooting.
Since he posted that message, it has received more than 8,000 likes, almost 3,000 retweets and a couple of hundred comments. The response was so overwhelming that he muted the app on his phone. Other Dalton students have seen even larger responses on their own posts, with tens of thousands of strangers sharing and reacting to what they have to say.
Now, Garcia said, students like him are increasingly finding they have an important voice in a national debate and he’s eager to use that platform to speak into the issue.
“I’m glad it’s happening. It’s just really important to talk about these things because it’s becoming such a large conversation,” he said. “Sometimes you have to ask yourself, ‘Is it going to take every single school in this country getting shot up to get something done?’ That shouldn’t be how it is. I’m happy people are talking about it.”
But while the responses online have been mostly supportive, internet trolls — people who post online to incite angry responses — have also rushed to post their own conspiracy theories and criticisms of the Dalton students.
“First ever teacher school shooter just a week after DT suggests teachers should carry guns? he was a martyr for the liberal agenda. let the facts come out, I bet he HATED DT and would do anything to prove a point. no one was injured for a reason!” a user called fake_russian69 tweeted at Garcia on Wednesday.
Other students saw the same backlash, firing back at their critics and doubling down on their calls for legislative reform even as some of those critics went so far as to claim students were in on a scheme to push a liberal agenda.
“I’m a student at dalton high school and I’m traumatized. Stop using my trauma for your conspiracies. We need to end gun violence now,” tweeted freshman Andrea Magana.
Again, a majority of the responses were positive, but a smaller, more skeptical group was present.
“Stop being traumatized. It makes you weak mentally, and sets a standard for your way of thinking into the future. by the time you’re older, you’ll want to live in a foam lined playpen where nothing can hurt you,” replied one Twitter user.
Another claimed the shooting was “totally staged” and that Davidson is a “registered Democrat, [who] hates the NRA.”
Similar messages mirrored posts after the Parkland shooting, which sought to undermine those teenagers using the shooting as an argument for tightening gun regulations. Garcia said those messages are troubling, but they’ve left him undaunted.
“What can frustrate me is that people will attack me and say it’s an opinion and not a fact that this happened. There really are people who think this was set up or there are larger forces behind it. It can be frustrating to have people try to discredit us like that,” he said.
“This happened and all of us don’t want it to happen again. We’re doing our best to reach out and make our voices heard and then you have all these people saying it’s not true,” he said. “There really is a problem and these people are trying to keep it from being seen.”
This is a familiar process to Dr. David Ludden, a psychology professor at Georgia Gwinett College, who has studied how conspiracy theories are generated and spread.
“I think the people who are creating this story that it’s a conspiracy are manufacturing it, but there are plenty of people who will buy into that argument,” he said. “People buy into this argument that the government is coming to take all of our guns. If you already believe that, it’s not too difficult to believe it when you hear reports that these are actually staged incidents by the government to create a pretext for taking our guns.”
The problem is complicated by several factors, he said, not the least of which is that the public’s media literacy — the ability to separate factual news reports from fiction — hasn’t kept pace with the average person’s capacity to disseminate misinformation.
“I think we’ve got social media to blame for that. It’s much easier to get any crazy idea out there to a wide public. Before the internet and social media, it was just a lot more difficult to get your ideas out to the public if you weren’t part of the mainstream,” he said.
But spreading such theories, especially when they push against and criticize children still working to process a terrifying situation, is problematic, Ludden said.
“What you’re basically telling a person is ‘What you experienced isn’t reality.’ That’s very disconcerting, especially for a young person who is still psychologically very vulnerable,” he said.
Although frustrated by some of the posts they’ve seen from trolls online, several Dalton students said they are determined now to work toward the legislative changes they want.
“When we were put on lockdown, I was actually in a meeting with a school social worker and another student and we were trying to put together a town meeting about gun control on the 12th. We’ve been trying to get in contact with some legislators and people in power to see what we can do locally to help,” Magana said.
“I guess now our plans are going to change and it’s definitely going to have an impact.”
Magana said she was inspired by the words and actions of the Parkland students, some of whom reached out to Dalton students to express their support. Dalton students did the same thing two days later in the wake of a fatal shooting at Central Michigan University.
“Im so sorry for what you must be going through,” Wesley Caceres tweeted to a student who survived that shooting. “I went through Wednesday Dalton High school shooting. If you need to talk to someone who has experienced it message me I am free to help.”