5 silly online conspiracy theories that always follow mass shootings

ByCraig Haley

Conspiracy theorists are not known for their originality.

Each time a mass shooting or attack occurs in the United States or beyond, the same, tired and absurd conspiracy theories reverberate across social media. In fact, the sad reality is that they’ve become just as inevitable as the tragic events and attacks that instigated them.

While differing types of conspiracy theories have always spread around the fringe of the mainstream, the popularity of social media and the increase of mass shooting in the US have given many of them a louder voice and much larger reach. After the tragic shooting of 20 young children at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012, such theories have become much more prevalent, and in many cases, have entered into the mainstream conscious.

So predictable are most of these conspiracy theories that we can, with a good degree of accuracy, predict exactly which ones will spread in the aftermath of any US mass shooting.

Here are 5 conspiracy theories that spread in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States.

“False Flag” event to increase gun control

The overriding theme of most conspiracy theories that follow the events after a mass shooting is that the shooting was a “false flag” event, meaning it was staged by the government (or other forces) to promote the agenda of increased gun control, with the eventual goal of disarming the American people, making them vulnerable for the ambiguous “government takeover” or the start of the ubiquitous “New World Order”.

Depending on the conspiracy theorist, a false flag event can mean one of two things –
1. That the event was entirely staged, and no one was killed or injured. This gives rise to the “crisis actor” theories we discuss next.
2. That the event was real but was staged and orchestrated by the government, not just the perpetrator. This theory is popular with the 9/11 “truther” movement.

Of course one of the fundamental flaws with this theory is that if the government is orchestrating these “false flag” mass shooting incidents to the end of increasing gun control legislation, then why has there been no meaningful or substantial gun control legislation passed since the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shootings? This theory seems to accept that the government is capable of orchestrating completely staged events in front of the national stage, fooling millions, but is incapable of achieving the presumably (and comparatively) much easier task of passing gun control regulation as the result of these staged events. And since a number of mass shootings have occurred since 2012, anyone accepting this theory would have to accept the government is continually and persistently orchestrating these staged events to increase gun control, yet just as persistently failing to pass gun control law.


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Crisis Actors

One of the most popular conspiracy theories is the theory of “crisis actors”, and despite its popularity, this is also one of the most bizarre and illogical brand of theories. The fundamental claim is that after a mass shooting that is – as per the previous point – a staged event, many of victims, survivors, first responders, families, spokespeople, local residents and staff are in reality all “crisis actors” employed by the government to play certain roles.

Needless to say, these theories have a number of gaping holes in their reasoning. Given that many of these incidents involve dozens of fatalities and many more injured, to effectively employ “crisis actors” without exposing the incident as a “false flag” staged event, even conservative estimates would have to put the number of crisis actors at any one shooting into the hundreds, even more.

Take the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, for example. Despite 58 people being killed and 851 injured, theories of “crisis actors” still circulated across the Internet, despite thousands of people being directly involved with the tragedy and presumably having to be involved in the cover-up.

Of course, this isn’t a likely scenario, and given the number of crisis actors that would be needed to cover the ever-growing number of mass shootings, this absurd conspiracy theory grows even more absurd. Such theories were particularly popular during the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

Photos of “Crisis Actors” at different shootings

As an extension from the previous point, a popular conspiracy theory claims that the same crisis actors will play roles at different and unrelated mass shootings. For example, one theory claimed that the sister of a victim at the Sandy Hook shooting also played the part of a crying friend at the Aurora 2012 movie theatre shooting.

We’ve yet to see any evidence to support these claims other than photos of vaguely similar-looking people at different shootings lined up along with the unfounded assertion (or rather, assumption) that it is the same person.

Since that evidence is clearly not evidence at all, there really is little to say about such nonsense.


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The second shooter conspiracy

The second shooter conspiracy is certainly not a new one. Most popularly, the shooting of 35th US President John Kennedy in 1963 inspired immensely popular theories of a second shooter positioned at the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Texas.

The second shooter conspiracy is offered as proof of some sort of cover-up, and as such is used to support the “false flag” narrative. Such theories are naturally fuelled by the notorious unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. In the aftermath of shootings where there is a large number of witnesses, it is common for widely conflicting eyewitness accounts. This can include eyewitnesses falsely recalling or assuming there is more than one shooter when that was not the case. This occurred both with the 2017 Las Vegas massacre and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas shooting, where in both cases a handful of witnesses reported two shooters instead of one.

There are many reasons why eyewitnesses may erroneously report multiple shooters when that is not the case, including misleading echoes of shots and bullets and the general confusion that commonly befalls any type of mass shooting. However these reasons are conveniently disregarded by conspiracy theorists. Despite the fact that the number of eyewitnesses reporting multiple shooters in these cases are greatly outnumbered by the witnesses reporting only a single shooter, conspiracy theorists will latch onto the testimony of anyone purporting multiple shooters since it promotes their overall narrative, and is offered as proof of a conspiracy.

Websites and social media posts reporting shooting before it even happened

Inevitably, in the hours and days following a shooting, conspiracy theorists will point to social media posts or blogs that have timestamps that precede the time and date of the shooting, and offer this as proof that such content was inadvertently posted prior to the shooting, and as such demonstrates proof of a cover-up or conspiracy.

However, there are simple explanations for this phenomenon. Often social media posts such as tweets about a shooting are incorrectly determined to have been posted before a shooting because of the conspiracy theorists inability to determine between different time zones. Tweets appear in the time zone of the user, which may be several hours before the time zone where a mass shooting occurred.

Alternatively, and more commonly, conspiracy theorists point to the timestamps that search engines like Google place their search results pages. However, such timestamps are notoriously unreliable. There is no industry standard when it comes to attaching and returning a date to an article, which commonly results in errors. Often results are pulled from webpages that contain a number of posts published at different times, or again this may be an issue with time zones. Google have recognised that their timestamps are not always accurate and have previously advised for user’s not to assume that they are always correct.

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Such conspiracy theories are inevitable, and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Sadly, it is almost inevitable that tragic events such as mass shootings and terrorism will continue to occur, both in the US and across the rest of the world, and it is inevitable that these nonsense conspiracy theories will not be far behind. Please be careful about what you choose to believe online. None of the above theories make any sense, and defy even the most basic logic at every corner.

While the unofficial adage of the conspiracy inclined is to “wake up”, we’d like to hope they would do just that. These theories just don’t make any sense, and it really is about time the Internet realised that.

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