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Why do mass shootings spawn conspiracy theories?

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By Michael Rocque and Stephanie Kelley-Romano

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It seems to me that the vast majority of conspiracy theories, whether engendered by mass shootings or otherwise, are not intended to "comfort" the believer. They're more a poisonous cocktail of paranoia, politics, self-interest, lack of education and delusional thinking whose effect is to alienate the believer from the rational majority and to give him/her a feeling of superiority over the rest of us. Maybe that's the "comfort", right there.

Well put. I find the idea that conspiracy theorists are people desperately looking to be regarded as intelligent very compelling. One thing I find about them is an inability to take a joke about their beliefs or to self-deprecate.

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Mass shootings and conspiracy theories have a long history. As far back as the mid-1990s, amid a spate of school shootings, Cutting Edge Ministries, a Christian fundamentalist website, found a supposed connection between the attacks and then-President Bill Clinton. The group’s website claimed that when lines were drawn between groups of school-shooting locations across the U.S., they crossed in Hope, Arkansas, Clinton’s hometown. The Cutting Edge Ministries concluded from this map that the “shootings were planned events, with the purpose of convincing enough Americans that guns are an evil that needs to be dealt with severely, thus allowing the federal government to achieve its Illuminist goal of seizing all weapons.”

Conservative personality Alex Jones recently failed to persuade the Texas Supreme Court to dismiss defamation and injury lawsuits against him by parents of children who were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. Jones has, for years, claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre didn’t happen, saying “the whole thing was fake,” and alleging it happened at the behest of gun-control groups and complicit media outlets.

Fine examples of all that is wrong in the USA today.

However, there seems to be some hope:

Explicit and clear evaluation of evidence and sources – in headlines and TV subtitles – have helped keep news consumers alert. And pop-up prompts from Twitter and Facebook encourage users to read articles before reposting. These steps can work, as shown by the substantial drop in misinformation on Twitter following former President Donald Trump’s removal from the platform.

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In America we have that greedy shtieking imecile Wayne :LaPierre with his rumors and lies, and the sheep who listen to him. Just saying.

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