Mass Shootings, False Flags and False Logic

I wrote this essay in 2016 after the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I rerun it now in the wake of another Floridian tragedy—the Valentine’s Day massacre at a Parkland, Florida high school, which took 17 lives, most of them high school students. In between, of course, we had what is the new worst mass shooting in US history, Las Vegas’s Harvest Festival massacre, in which 58 people died.

This article deals specifically with the irrational leap to conspiracy theories that are thick in the air afte...