Source: Bigstock

Most amusingly, the false-flag conspiracy theorists have noticed the steadily decreasing level of coverage too! For the past month, conspiracy sites have run pieces with headlines like “Why Has The Las Vegas Massacre Disappeared From The News Cycle?” and “10 Compelling Reasons Why the Vegas Shooting Has Disappeared From Headlines.” Of course, being conspiracy theorists, many of these bozos feel compelled to answer a sane question with an insane answer. One popular theory is that the mid-October Northern California wildfires were not actual wildfires per se, but rather the result of a (in its second appearance in this piece, please welcome) “directed energy weapon” beamed down from the sky by “them” in order to distract from the Vegas shooting and bury it in the news cycle. In other words, “they” fabricated a terrible event to divert attention from the terrible event they fabricated to draw attention.

You gotta give ’em credit—that’s some masterful bullshit right there.

Why do mass-shooting stories appear to lack the legs they once had? The obvious answer is a 24-hour news cycle that’s become so dependent on social media, new “stories of the hour” are needed to keep people sharing, posting, liking, and tweeting. Also, we can thank Fetzer, Barrett, and their conspiracy pals for the fact that mass-shooting victims, friends, relatives, and witnesses don’t do as much media as they used to, because who wants to deal with the kind of harassment the self-appointed “truth investigators” inflict upon people they suspect of being “crisis actors”? I also have a sneaking suspicion that national media outlets have purposely started to devote less coverage to these kinds of stories, as there has been a longstanding (and quite reasonable) fear that the guarantee of massive publicity has been one of the motivating factors behind many of the shootings.

But here’s the truly important takeaway, and this is why the “false-flag mass shootings are staged to grab our guns” theory is dead. Even the conspiracy nuts have been forced to admit that people are responding to the recent “rash” of mass shootings not with panic, not with a demand for gun control, but rather with a sense of resignation, of acceptance. The “sheeple” aren’t panicking; they’re tuning out. Las Vegas was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, and no one gives a fuck anymore. No one’s clamoring for answers, no one’s demanding details, there’s absolutely no major push for gun control, and people are buying guns, rather than rejecting them, in record numbers. Forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy predicted this course of events back in December 2015. Following the San Bernardino mass-shooting terror attack, Meloy told the L.A. Times, “When you have an event that is happening frequently, people will resign themselves to the recurrence of the event. The result is hypersensitivity to personal safety and an acceptance when it happens to others.” In other words, you buy a gun to protect yourself, and you stop caring about what’s happening to others.

If the point of false-flag mass shootings has been to drum up gun-control panic, the actual result has been quite the opposite. As The Atlantic pointed out in October, gun laws are typically loosened following a mass shooting. The motivating factor behind these supposed “false flags” has been debunked; mass shootings do not lead to gun-grabbing, and the more shootings there are, the less the public gives a damn.

Surely, if “they” are too stupid to notice this simple and easily observable fact, “they” are hardly worth fearing.