OPINION

Please Stop with the Conspiracy Theories About Recent Mass Shootings

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Stop. Just stop. Both sides, Left and Right, stop.

George Soros did not engage in mass murder and neither did Donald Trump, nor did either have anything to do with the actions of one deranged individual operating independently. It wasn’t an FBI conspiracy or Antifa, nor was it a conspiracy among white people who voted for Donald Trump. 

Antifa and the KKK are no different in my book. When either commits acts of violence, they should be immediately prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. However, not every Democrat is a supporter of Antifa and not every Republican is a white nationalist. Please stop trying desperately to make those connections every time some nut job kills some innocent people. And, until one of these shooters actually is a card-carrying member of the NRA, please stop blaming the gun rights organization for the actions of cold-blooded killers.

Can we just stop, take a deep breath, and admit that there are crazy people among us who feed on this nonsense, some to the point of committing mass murder? Not only are some people crazy, they are evil too. Cain killed his brother Abel with a rock and things haven’t gotten much better since. We live in a fallen world. No one has fixed it yet, and it’s a pretty safe bet that no one will.

Has anyone noticed lately that a good number of “reports”, especially on the Internet, widely circulated in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting, are erroneous? I don’t know which is crazier, people’s obsession with the shooter’s political affiliation and choice of weapon, or the fact that some homicidal maniac just killed a dozen innocent people at Wal-Mart. 

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, many immediately leapt to the conclusion that the shooter was anti-Trump since he fired upon a country music crowd. When that didn’t pan out, some claimed that it was a false flag operation by someone under the mind control of the CIA or FBI. Why is it so hard to consider that maybe the shooter was just nuts? Is it so hard to fathom that there are just some people who live among us who are mentally unstable and prone to doing insane things?

As for preventing these kinds of mass shootings, let’s say that we all agree for a single moment in time that we should keep guns from insane people. Most people would not disagree that mentally unstable people should not be in possession of firearms. However, how do we prove someone might be insane? How do we keep something from someone who has yet to prove they are insane? Since there is no accurate test for insanity, this thinking in itself is insanity. 

Which is crazier, assuming there is a secret department in the FBI or CIA that uses some sort of mind control on unknowing participants in order to get them to commit mass murder to achieve some sort of political agenda, or reaching a point in your life where you believe the best remedy to a situation is to commit mass murder? Is it any less crazy to assume that every mass murder is somehow the fault of the NRA or Donald Trump? Please stop.

It’s a sad day when each side hopes the shooter is someone who fits their mold as to what a mass shooter should look like or uses a weapon that they wish to demonize.

Media on both sides tend to report what they want their viewers to hear. Mass murder is always a hot topic as long as it fits certain narratives. That’s why you don’t hear reports in the mainstream media about the 1,600-plus people shot in Chicago in 2019. Is the media racist for not reporting that the vast majority of Chicago murder victims were non-white? The ratio of men killed to women is greater than five to one, but don’t expect to see feminists marching in the streets of Chicago about the gender disparity between victims.

Any law enforcement officer or prosecutor will tell you that eyewitnesses are the worst evidence in a court of law. This is why reports of multiple shooters in the immediate aftermath of an event are most often wrong. In large spaces, gunfire echoes causing a multiplier effect easily misidentified as gunfire from more than one direction or multiple shooters. Shootings are pure chaos, which is why it takes weeks, months and sometimes even years to completely investigate some shootings. Can we just give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt before jumping to conclusions that they are all in on some mass conspiracy theory cooked up in some remote office in Washington D.C.? Real life doesn’t work like a one hour episode of CSI.

Many shootings go unsolved, so why is it so hard to fathom why law enforcement can’t always come up with a motive of a mass shooter like the one in Vegas? After all, he wasn’t available for questioning and didn’t leave a manifesto. Is it written somewhere that every mass shooter leave a manifesto? Sometimes crazy people just do crazy things.

Books could be written about all the unverified statements, photos, tweets, voter registration, memberships and other affiliations of assailants circulating immediately following mass shootings, and, sadly, many if not most are in error. The real conspiracy is who starts this stuff and why. I might actually believe a conspiracy theory that the Russians are doing this in order to keep us all divided. Until some evidence appears to support that theory, please stop spreading this nonsense. 

Just stop.